Kivi, Toilet and Shotgun already seem to know where it belongs, because it’s the worst game I’ve had the misfortune to play. Kivi, Toilet and Shotgun is a top-down shooter that switches between two different stages: a driving stage and a town stage. The driving stage consists of driving down a dark brown road, fighting other cars and people. The enemies during this portion of the game are randomly generated. Sometimes you can easily get through this; other times it’s an absolute nightmare. Cars will be tricked out with armor and rocket launchers that will easily destroy your car in a few hits. The guys just standing in the street will, in some cases do more damage to you than the enemy cars.
If there is a group of three guys, you need to make a wide sweep around them or they will take off a quarter to half your car’s health just by driving through them. You can use your Nitro to boost through these areas quicker so that you take less damage. But it still makes no sense how one guy is a bigger threat to you than three trucks driving around. During these sections, you not only need to worry about your health but also your gasoline. You can buy more in town and very seldom will guys drop any.
In town, you start off with simple wave-based combat. Gun combat is fairly boring; there really isn’t anything to it. You walk around and shoot at other people (who are also walking around and shooting). Once you’ve cleared out the various waves, you are free to access the town. Here you can buy supplies, upgrades, and a car. Here you also auto-save. There really isn’t much more to say about this part of the game.
This is one of the most unbalanced games I’ve played in a long time. In later sections, you’ll need to drive longer distances than in earlier stages. You absolutely do not have enough gas to make these trips. There is one section where you stop to fight a big train. The train is about as far away as one of the towns, and then it’s about the same distance again to reach the actual town. You barely have enough gas to make it to the train, let alone beyond it. You’d better pray that somewhere along the way someone drops some gas for you. I played this section over and over. I got nowhere. I started a new game in hopes that it would give me better luck. No such luck. Even purchasing the extended gas tank I couldn’t make it beyond this point until the train happened to drop a can of gas.
While you’re in town, there’s a constant big yellow sign warning that you are out of your car. During one of these moments on the train, I decided to not enter my car, but rather to walk the rest of the way. The game didn’t like this and started to bug out. There weren’t any enemy vehicles along the way, just men standing in the street. Upon reaching the next town, which I was surprised I could even do without my car, the wave combat started. However, it just said that four waves and zero men remained. There was no one to fight. Kivi, Toilet and Shotgun didn’t save, and I couldn’t access the town. So beware that leaving the vicinity of your car can bug the game out. In another instance, I was fighting the people in the town, trying to unlock it. This happened after an especially harrowing car sequence that made me restart several times for various stupid reasons. Here I was down to the last guy on the last wave, and he walked into a building and disappeared. I couldn’t kill him. The game still counted him as being around and literally the only thing I could do was return to the main menu and start from my previous save.
The gameplay wasn’t the only glitch I encountered. The sound effects would turn off periodically, as well. The sound of the gun shooting, the sound of the cars; everything would just go quiet. This was quickly followed by the background music going out, with only a few environmental noises remaining. This game was absolutely littered with bugs and glitches. But don’t you worry, those weren’t the only technical problems I encountered. There were some crashes too! A couple of times when trying to quit the game, it would just crash, leaving me with a white screen that covered up everything. Other applications would just open behind this white screen, rendering them inaccessible. From here I could do two things: go back into the game (for whatever reason, clicking on the icon opened the game again) or restart my computer. Obviously, the latter was the less obnoxious choice. Kivi, Toilet and Shotgun is by far one of the worst experiences I’ve had in a long while.
-Jordan Kamm-
An autistic gamer with opinions on games who also enjoys making dumb videos on the internet!