Kraken Empire’s upcoming space shooter Kromaia is going to be one of those games genre fans will be more than pleased to see thanks to the stellar visuals and intuitive control scheme (provided you use a keyboard/mouse or decent game controller). Rising Star Games has wisely snapped this one up for a Q4 2014 release and I recently got my paws on some preview code to take for a spin. And spin I did, as the ships in the game are all kinds of maneuverable thanks to the six degrees of movement through the game’s enemy and obstacle-packed levels..

The preview build had four different levels and four types of ships to play around with, each linked to one of the stages. While I could sit here and make comparisons to Star Fox, Panzer Dragoon, Rez and other excellent sci-fi or fantasy shooters where you’re set on a path without much deviation, Kromaia outdoes those games by allowing you to go anywhere you point that ship you’re flying. There are clear goals in each map, but you can choose to go off what you thought was a predetermined path and zip around at your leisure while trying not to get blown into plenty of pixels by the nicely aggressive enemy AI…

The ability to roll, reverse or otherwise get the heck out of harm’s way is a HUGE plus, especially given the game seems set on making you earn your keep right from the get-go. There’s a tutorial that shows you the ropes and it’s also telling you right away that this isn’t a simple 3D shmup at all. Each of the four ships has specific weapons that have reload times in play, so you can’t just hold a button down and tra-la-la through the missions, occasionally dropping a smart bomb to clear the screen. Nope, in this game both the enemies and environments want you dead and you’ll get wiped out quickly if you do something silly like blink at the wrong moment (things frequently get pretty frantic as you get your bearings) or take any part for granted.

That said, once you get the hang of the slick speed and solid controls and don’t get so distracted by the gorgeous polygon art all over the place trying to do your ships in or get you going “Ooooh!” before your ship is done in, the game has that “zen-like” flow a good shooter does when everything starts clicking and you get into a groove for a bit. Well, right up to the point before you get shot to pieces by one of the wildly creative bosses, that is. There wasn’t a favorite ship for me because they’re all awesome to play with, but if you put a space gun to my head, I’d say the green ship’s homing missiles and swarm combo made me grin the most when I got going. Par for the shmup course, each of the four ships has primary and secondary weapons and using those guns (and the awesome grappling hook) efficiently will keep you going through multiple replays.

While I had quite a lot of fun with the game, my one worry is the PC-only thing (yet again) that will keep this out of the hands of console players and shmup fans dying for something cool like this on their platform of choice. Granted, Kromaia does require a decent 3D card to run smoothly, but there’s no reason this shouldn’t be on the PS4 and Vita or Xbox One at some point. Well, I’d guess that’s up to how well it does as a digital-only PC game and how fast someone can fly out a few dev kits to the Empire. As it is, this one’s got HIT written all over it in a big blocky retro typeface and you should probably keep an eyeball peeled for it to arrive on Steam (and perhaps some other digital delivery platforms) shortly.