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It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what the developers of Yuko and the Akuma Menace were trying to make. If they were trying to make a maze game, then the mazes are so ludicrously easy that they’re impossible to wring enjoyment out of them. If they were making a hack-and-slash, then it should probably let you hack and slash more than once every few seconds. If they were trying to make a puzzle game, then they should have slotted in some that didn’t swing between easy and hellishly infuriating.
We should state up front that Yuko and the Akuma Menace is not a good game. Your wallets can safely return to their jacket pockets. But it has become a kind of mission for us: what exactly is the intention behind Yuko and the Akuma Menace? Genuinely, we are at a loss.
It’s certainly not a narrative game. All you need to know is in that title: you are Yuko, shadow ninja and protector of the land, looking to stop an Akuma – read: demon – menace. What that seems to mean is moving through an interminable number of near-identical levels in the hope that you might actually see them.
These levels are all on a grid. You’re not moving fluidly, you’re moving one square at a time with the tap of the analogue stick. Now, that would make sense if you were playing some kind of turn-based tactics game, where positional play and turn order is important, or even a game like Crypt of the Necrodancer when a move means something. When you move, the enemy moves. But here, it’s just a limitation.
You see, the enemies aren’t moving as you move. They can move free as they like. It’s only you who is locked to chessboards. You’re hopscotching towards an enemy, locked to your squares, while they’re staring at you, confused, and then charging at you with a mallet. If we’re being kind it’s a tad static; if we’re not being kind, it feels like bringing a baguette to a sword fight. It’s rubbish.
At least combat levels the playing field. Both you and your opponent are subject to the same game-tick. MMO players will know what this means: basically, you can only attack at a certain rate, as if an invisible cooldown is playing in the background. You hit, then wait, then wait some more, and then you can hit again.
It works in some older MMOs because you can manage that tick. You can do other things, like drink potions, in the time between. But you can’t do much of this sort in Yuko and the Akuma Menace. You might drop a smoke bomb to evade a couple of attacks, but that’s the limit. Even worse, the timer is opaque. The cooldown isn’t visible, and the rules of who hits who are difficult to parse. You hit the enemy once every other attack (why did they bother with a second attack if it always misses?) while, we think, the enemies are random. There’s a percentage chance that they will damage you, but we can’t be sure that some other sorcery is at play.
The randomness sucks. In a sea of sucky decisions, it’s the one we despise the most. Because health is so important. It’s a precious commodity, yet you can sidle up to an ent or fire elemental and get two unlucky rolls. Suddenly you are on your last health pip, when death means a complete replay of the entire level. It’s not like combat is particularly avoidable – those squares mean that it’s single-file through the dungeon – so you’re praying to the gods of randomness for passage to the next level.
There are shuriken and smoke bombs to add a bit of spice, which is something, we suppose. The smoke bombs in particular are life savers. They’re a get-out-of-jail-free card that, as long as you’re paying attention, will let you bypass a set number of enemies. But they’re finite and soon gone. The shuriken are cruddy in comparison: not only do they do a pitiful amount of damage, but they’re fiddly to control. We were just as likely to accidentally walk in a direction than throw the shuriken. When you’ve got a looming death-tree coming at you, it is a problem.
The puzzles are slightly better, but they come with the same downside as combat: one wrong step, and the level needs to be replayed. There’s a special place in hell for the sokoban-style box-pushing puzzles here, as – if you get stuck – your only option is to manually restart everything that came before. Elemental puzzles aren’t much better. You need to pick up elemental runes and apply them to the environment, as Fire and Water make steam, and other simple match-ups. But carrying the rune is a lumbering affair where you can’t attack while holding it, and putting the thing down takes an age (and it’s easy to accidentally pick it back up). More than once, we’ve died while hulking these rocks about.
So we come back to our original question. What were the developers of Yuko and the Akuma Menace trying to make? Did they imagine the joy would come from the combat? We sincerely hope not, because you are inexplicably playing turn-based combat with enemies that have been ported in from Diablo. Surely it can’t be a maze or puzzle game either, because they’re so basic that you could have drawn them on lined paper.
There is clearly a lot of love in Yuko and the Akuma Menace, because there’s so much of it. The levels play endlessly, and there are multiple different regions. The levels may repeat a little too much, but they have all been precisely constructed and are pretty damn long. Upgrades tempt you to keep playing, even if access to them is slightly too restricted.
Someone clearly believes in Yuko and the Akuma Menace. That someone isn’t us, though. The only thing that gave us enjoyment while playing Yuko and the Akuma Menace was working out what the designers were trying to achieve. It’s a puzzle, wrapped in an enigma, and then tied up in soiled underwear. It’s an experience that we’d rather not be exposed to again.