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Kudos

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Developer: Positech Games Publisher: Positech Games Genre: Simulation > General Released: Oct 30, 2006 Players: 0 Website Download Purchase

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Kudos is an ambitious project from the creator of the engaging political sim, Democracy. In Democracy, the goal of the gamer was to constantly adjust different societal factors in order to best please the voters at large. Each decision involved a different level of push and pull across a multitude of special interest groups and they game gave a great sensation of how difficult it can be as a politician to make everyone happy.

Kudos aims to take a similar principle (how different actions will boost and reduce stats) and apply them to the life of a human being and the result is sometimes as engaging as the efforts in Democracy, but doesn't come close to being as cleanly executed.

The interface in Kudos is effective, though not as cleverly utilized as Democracy's. It is very easy to get a glance at all relevant player stats very easily. There's no need for constantly popping open menus, which is a real plus. It can get irritating to always be clicking on the headshots for your various friends to find out their interests and friendship level with you, but that's a relatively minor quibble. Available for your monitoring are a number of aspects of your life. At the top is a schedule announcing when you have evening classes coming up, as well as your current cash level and your "kudos". Kudos are points awarded to a player for trying new things and having social events do well. They can be thought of as representing your gamer score.

Below all that is your character model, all of which are pretty well done, if at times somewhat creepy. More than a few of the characters' upset facial expressions look more than a little malevolent. Immediately next to your character's image are your stats with items ranging from your IQ and Culture level to your Health and Alcohol consumption level to your overall Happiness. Across from that will be your active friends at any given time. This will change frequently, and there will be more on that later. To your far left will be your career info, telling you what you do, what you make, who you work for, how you get to work and how far it is. You can expand that menu to show your specific status at work (how close are you to a promotion, etc.) and to change the method of your commute to work.

Finally, across the bottom of the screen will be listed the skills your character picks up at classes and from books and other activities, in addition to the items you can occupy your time with on a day-to-day basis. The skills will very likely quickly start to overwhelm the screen and it would have been nice to see an option to collapse that box to free up screen space. Your daily activities can include signing up for evening classes (attending each also occupies an entire day), hanging out on your own, hanging out with friends, and searching for a job (another task that apparently takes an entire day).

Which brings us to the issue of time. The game is said to start the gamer off when they're 20 years old and then allow them to play through 10 years of life, upon which the game ends. The game plays as if you're going to be doing this a day at a time (a week consists of all seven days), but a year of gametime does not equal 52 separate weeks. So, how much time does each day that passes actually represent? Hard to say. I was never sure and that leads to many of my inabilities to comprehend how the game is calculating things.

Keeping up a friendship requires constant contact with buddies or they'll lose touch. But, when what to me seems like just two weeks have passed in-game and all my friends have abandoned me, I get confused as to why they would be so fickle. If those two weeks were actually four or five months of no contact I may understand a little better, but I have no real way to tell, reliably, as there's no calendar that shows the gamer where they are in the progression of a given year. It can also be difficult to keep steady contact with a large group of friends as every activity you do will consume all the time you have remaining after work that day. Weekend days allow for two activities a day.

Continuing to rock the transition action: friends and other goals. There are many things you can be and do in Kudos; that much is clear. There are bunches of classes to take and careers to pursue and a good variety of items to purchase and things to do. However, there only ever seem to be two goals in the game: to get friends, and to make money. Near as I can tell you cannot gain a significant other or have children (which I found odd since there's an option to allow for homosexual relationships). This makes life, as it were, very flat in Kudos, mostly because to keep up friends (to keep them entertained, more accurately), you need to keep up your cash flow, which really means the game is about making money more than it is about living your life.

Hanging out with friends is a touchy proposition, as your friends are pretty much a-holes. Yeah, I said it. They suck. They will never enjoy an activity that is not something on their list of things that they enjoy. That means that your character can never really develop their own likes or dislikes, you're forced to like or dislike whatever your current friends prefer. Also, if you're in a bad mood at an event… they don't cheer you up, the event goes poorly because they didn't enjoy your mood. This means that if you're bummed, hanging out with friends only makes things worse for you because now you're upset and no one likes you. Also, the upkeep for friends is a one-way job. They will sometimes call you to hang out, but if you go long enough without contacting them to hang out and the friendship reduces to zero, they're just gone. But as the game doesn't give the gamer the chance to dump friends (friends only leave you, never the other way around), so effectively the gamer is always getting dissed. And don't even get me started on how you don't seem to be able to have a fulfilling life if you don't hang out with other people…

The last item I'm going to harp on (I think) is the stats that govern the game. In Democracy, the end result of every action was very clear to the player, inspiring a lot of thought about the best course before proceeding. In Kudos, it's never too clear if something you do will have any effect at all. I was never able to learn effectively what made my person happy. It seemed entirely random and dictated more than anything by how my day at work was, an item that is randomly selected for the gamer. For any given action, I was unsure how my player would react, which made me feel like I really couldn't do much to better myself in the game beyond making more money, the only clearly trackable stat. And certain stats behave oddly. I'm not sure why my Culture or IQ stat should lower with time, but they do. Is the brain of my character leaking? Was I dropped when I was little?

In the end, Kudos just doesn't quite get there. A slick interface can't hide a jumbled mess of a back-end. Things are too random in the game for it to be a satisfying life sim. It may be too much for a game to have stats that adjust and respond to the player's choices (if my character does a lot of crossword puzzles, the game should take that to be something that makes me happy, rather than always having it increase my loneliness), but it is certainly not too much for me to expect that from a game. As a gamer, I shouldn't have to be nodding and saying that, "Well, maybe they just couldn't have a game that sophisticated." If that's the case, then maybe it was too soon to try.

Graphics:
There just aren't tons of graphics too Kudos. I'd be doing the game wrong to fault it for graphics when they aren't the point, but it'd be granting it too much to give it two thumbs up. The character models are good, but can be a bit creepy. The interface is all pretty nice looking, but that's really all there is… interface. The only special event that gets a different set of graphics seems to be going to the club. A little bit more variety of backgrounds or special graphics could have bumped this up a bit.

Sound:
Sitting here, writing the review, I can't seem to recall the sound in Kudos. Not that it's not there, it's just that none of it stuck out to me. As with the graphics, the sound won't really make or break your experience with Kudos. The music for the game is far from bad, however.

Gameplay:
Gameplay is a tough category to judge for Kudos. The interface is nice, as I've said, and it's very workable. This much is to be commended. Screen space is pretty efficient (with the exception of the bloated skills section). However, so much of the gameplay is centered around the results of the actions picked from within the interface and the results of those actions serve to obscure the function of what is an otherwise well-formed system. Hit and miss.

Concept:
Kudos is ambitious. It aimed to take The Sims and up the ante a bit and to take life and pare it down into something that can be gamed. For all the variety plugged into the title, though, in the end the gameplay ends up being very rigid. However, that doesn't mean the game didn't reach for it. It tried and took a big step towards what I think could be an excellent sequel… or even eventual update on this version.

Value:
Well, the value of any game is based on whether or not you like it after the purchase. Let's assume Kudos is right up your alley. If so, it's a good value. The update system is quick and convenient (except for when you have TONS of updates present, the scroll arrows click one at a time and when you install one update, it resets your location in the list to the top item) and allows for user submitted avatars, friend headshots, professions, backgrounds, etc. If the game is embraced by fans, there can be tons of content.

Overall:
Kudos is a good idea that I just don't think was done well enough. However, it was still easy to play and engaging enough for me to drill down and figure out just exactly what it was about the game that irked me. For anyone with the sim itch, sample the title, it may just hook you. For anyone looking to live a virtual life, the ever-growing MMO Second Life may be a more "realistic" title for you to sample.