It might seem pretentious to say that after a few rounds of Kraken Land, it starts to feel a lot like one of latest 3D incarnations of Super Mario. But we stand by it: this title from Honikou Games is one of the few in its genre on Android that is played smoothly on a touchscreen. The rest of its excellence lies in its intoxicating graphics, with more than a fair number of licenses to Nintendo games and a pacing designed for consumption in small doses that never wind down into tedium.
Swap out the plumber for a sort of octopus with a hanky on his head but keep the length of the levels, the aesthetic, and the set of cameras used, for example, in Super Mario 3D Land for 3DS and – boom – you’ve got basically all the ingredients to Kraken Land. You control your direction and movement speed with a D-pad, while tapping any other part of the screen makes you jump. With these basic commands you can do all kinds of variations, from double-jumps to bounces off the walls to sprints in a straight line, as well as falling on top of enemies to defeat them and interacting with other items that endow you with extra powers for short stints.
The sole concession to the mobile genre is its progression system. Each level has three different objectives that correspond to the three stars you can win. Plus the time it takes you to beat each area will also determine whether you get a gold, silver, or bronze medal. These two tasks serve as prerequisites for unlocking the successive levels, so you’ll have to go back over previous areas and get the proper number of stars. In terms of this system, which came first – chicken or egg? There are more and more similarities between the smartphone game and the computer one.
Between its paradisiacal settings, the possibility of getting skins for the protagonist, and the fact that you also see your friends’ scores, Kraken Land stands as a robust and fun title that we are way more excited about than most other games like it on Android. Obviously there are in-game purchases to speed along the process of getting to the later worlds, but this would be like paying for the 120 stars in Mario 64 – a thing of interest solely to cowards and the weak of spirit!
Kraken Land for Android on Uptodown [APK] | Download
