With the popularity of stealth games on the rise thanks to the Thief and Metal Gear Solid series, the writing is on the wall where budget titles will give it a go. One of them is naturally this game, K. Hawk - Survival Instinct where this game incorporates stealth and adventure gameplay, well according to the blurb anyways. However what it turns out to be was a watered down version of a stealth game, lacklustre storyline and quite frankly, boring to play. And this is one of the few games that I actually wished the ending couldn’t arrive sooner.
So you play the character named Kitty Hawk, a helicopter pilot where your task is to set down a navy seal officer on an island somewhere in the pacific. Of course things don’t go as planned as the helicopter got shot down and the seal officer, nowhere to be found, presume dead. So, because you are the only one standing, the mission must go on as instructed by your leader – that is to infiltrate the island to discover its secrets considering there’s a large number of crack squads lingering about.
So, as mentioned before, this game plays out using stealth and adventure. Sadly, its selling points are its weakness as both are simply watered down versions. Yet, before you embark on your journey, you can opt to do the training mission where you use all the skills required to finish the game. I suggest to play through this as the controls are somewhat awkward as most likely, you will discover things that you thought wasn’t possible.
I won’t into too much describing about the controls however what I can say is, it took me a little while customising the keys ensuring a smooth ride and the net result was adequate, only just. Yet the stealth gameplay is not what you come to expect. Granted that stealth plays a lot in this game otherwise you will alert the entire map of goons and that makes life for Kitty pretty hard. Why is that is because gunfire is literally a hit / miss as the damage indicator is pretty random. That is, there are times I scored an instant kill by firing a headshot and times it takes me six bullets to knock them out – totally inconsistent.
Not only that, the entire screen has a gentle swaying motion where I gather it’s trying to represent real movement. And if Kitty decides to run, the more noticeable the sway. This also applies when Kitty fires a gun as the screen will sway. You think that after her seal training, she should have a steadier hand. Yet, and thankfully so, the weapons you find later on do pack a punch. Yet be warned that ammo are hard to come by, along with health packs so you need to sneak around the area locating them. This part I quite enjoy as it plays like a survival game where it plays to explore. However, Kitty’s walking animation is all screwed up as there many times where she just slides around instead of having a walking / running animation.
Because the vast gameplay revolves around stealth, unfortunately it’s not a decent implementation of it. First thing, Kitty has a communicator’s device where her mission updates are here. Also it serves as a motion tracking device where you can see two things: noise levels (indicating a circle around the person) and sight, indicated as a cone shape object. So if Kitty is not in the line of sight, she’s practically invisible. So far so good however this also applies when Kitty is literally standing in the middle of a lighted area. Other words, the line of sight does not adjust to darkness so as you can imagine, it looks very weird considering no one can detect Kitty, even standing under a lamp post only because she’s not in the line of sight.
Sound also plays a somewhat important part as, when Kitty runs, that circle around her grows quite large, indicating a lot of noise. Also, because enemies have the same noise circle, they can easily be alerted when Kitty runs. However, when staying still, you can have a goon walk literally one metre away from Kitty, unable to spot her only because she’s not in the line of sight. Yet, the moment you move at that close range, all the enemies have a remarkable ability to pin point your exact location and naturally their line of sight doubles. Also did I mention that Kitty cannot jump at all? Not even half a metre up so if she encounters a small ledge, too bad – walk around it.
Considering Kitty has the top of the range communication device, where it even detects noise levels / line of sight, it has great difficulty auto mapping the area. All the device does is draws some lines indicating walls etc. Also, because it’s a communication device, it can only be accessed via the inventory and not by a simple hotkey and it’s your only form of mission updates. But a nice feature to this is that, when Kitty draws a gun, the communication device disappears. Other words, you will have no idea where the enemies are now as I presume the device is a handheld, thus disappears when holding a gun – I can deal with that.
Visually it looks like the game arrived from 1999. I guess because it’s a budget game, don’t expect too much, for which I didn’t. The outdoor environments are reasonable to look at with nice foliage, cliffs and so on. Indoors looks a little bland however the furniture placements makes reasonable sense – that is, not placing a table because you can. Colourful to boot so it’s average at best however there’s plenty of graphical glitches. An example of this is where the ‘line of sight’ from the enemy causes the game go into a graphical fritz – and I tell you, there’s plenty of times this has done that. The sounds are not so good – voice acting is pretty bland as it sounds like someone is reading straight from the script, not enough ambience sounds as the looping is too obvious and even the sounds projecting from the weapons are bland.
The game has ten missions in total that takes roughly about an hour to complete – of course it depends upon your playing style however, for the matter of ease, try not to alert the guards as it can be a royal pain as shooting them with your pistol is pretty worthless. That said, it’s very hard for me to recommend this game to any stealth lovers as there are plenty of stealth games or even semi stealth games that blows this game out of the water. Yes, it’s a budget title however they can, at least, make the story interesting as it’s extremely cliché. All I can say is I’m glad I finished it as it was a struggle from about mission four onwards and honestly, I really couldn’t give a damn if I alerted the guards as I really didn’t care much about the main character.
4.5 / 10