Review: Go Kane!

Delhi-based indie studio SuperSike Games, co-founded by IVG’s own Amit Goyal (TAG on the forums), has just released its latest game, Go Kane! It’s is a humorously twisted story about the lengths to which one man will go for the woman he loves. In this case, that involves buying and selling drugs to come up with enough cash to pay the ransom and free his kidnapped girlfriend.

You start out with a wad of cash, which you can use to buy drugs and hopefully sell them for a profit. Each type of narcotic has its own “best price” and your aim is to sell your drugs for as close to that best price as possible.

The catch here is that you only get limited turns – 25 to be exact – in which time you have to come up with the required ransom amount. This, as I repeatedly discovered, was easier said than done. The short nature of the game makes it ideal for the mobile platform, where fun gameplay in short bursts is the order of the day.

Go Kane! impresses with its 2D visuals, with its use of colour, fonts and character art managing to make a game that is essentially about numbers look way more interesting and lively than you’d expect.

The big drawback though is that the outcome of each game seems more about luck than calculation. You could be well on your way to reaching your target with only half your turns used, and then a series of cop busts will leave you short of cash and short of your target.

There’s a risk meter that tells you when you run the risk of being busted by a cop, and on multiple occasions I’ve been busted with the meter at the halfway mark, and the only way I can explain this is that I was getting to my target too easily and this was a way for the game to impede my progresses. A very unfair way, I might add. To Supersike’s credit, the team does acknowledge that cop busts aren’t as “fair” as they would like them to be, and it is something they’ll work on for a future update.

As it stands, it often seems like the game conspires to keep you from reaching that magic $125,000 mark. Once you do reach your target, however, you move on to the next chapter in the game, which again sets the same gameplay targets, but now has a different ending to the story. I would have liked the stakes to be raised with a higher ransom amount and a corresponding increase in turns.

Go Kane! is a unique concept – so much so that Apple deemed it a little too unique for the App Store – and it’s worth the free download for that alone. It’s easy to see that a lot of work has gone into the idea and its presentation, but the risk system, which the gameplay is built around, often feels too random and unfair, making the leisurely activity of drug dealing more frustrating than it should be.