Kwari review

So the redeeming feature would be what’s at stake, right? The chance to make a fortune. You can make cash in Kwari by killing your opponents or by ending the round in possession of a pill: like a flag, but edible. Be excellent, and you could apparently make a packet. There are whopping prizes on offer in the realms of tens of thousands of dollars. The trouble is, unless you are really, really good and/or lucky, you won’t be making anything. This has to do with the unbalanced nature of the money movement. If you’re playing with ten other players, and they’re all firing at you, you’re going to be losing a lot more cash than you can gain by shooting one of them at a time. In three matches, we’d blown twenty bucks. It doesn’t feel fun.

It would make much more sense to adopt the approach of a sit-and-go poker game. You pay to enter a match, the top three players coming out with a win, the rest having committed how much they were prepared to lose at the start. The way it is now, get in a server with some decent players, and you could see your funds dribble away.

There’s a free version, but without the incentive of profit there’s no reason to put up with such a dated, remarkably clunky shooter. With only one game mode at launch, and so few playing, right now there isn’t much point in putting up with the commercial version, either.