KleptoCorns Review

How Cute

The quirky storytelling and dazzling pastel visuals drew me in when I first opened up Hyperbeard’s KleptoCorns. I’m a sucker for cute things, so naturally, I wanted to play this title. I was expecting a build-your-own environment action-adventure game in which I’d be collecting a variety of cute unicorns. What I got instead was a casual version of a gacha game, but again, with unicorns. My expectations weren’t high, yet they were still somehow let down.

Effortless

Your job is to restore the lands by gathering lost artifacts. From Glitter Falls to Aquinea, you must bring them back to their former glory. You send unicorns, one at a time, out into space to retrieve items that their world has lost. These items consist of anything from magic potions to a box of donuts, and even though it was random, it somehow worked with the aesthetic of the game. Each map holds 100 items and can habituate up to 15 different unicorns. You wash, brush, and feed the unicorns to get their heart meter to 100% before sending them out on their adventure. You acquire gems through these adventures with which you summon more unicorns and the cycle continues on from there.

Then you wait for your unicorn to come back, sometimes up to a whopping 25 minutes, and what do you do during that time? Well, there are four different carnival mini-games that you can play while one of your unicorns is out and about doing all the work. The mini-games consist of ring toss, coin toss, fishing, and coin dozer. However, none of these mini-games contributes to the progression of the game. They offer up only a few coins at best and designed to kill time as you’re waiting for your unicorn to come back. They are elementary in terms of design like something for a toddler. The only real way to gather items, get currency, or obtain unicorns is to wait, watch ads, or pay money. No effort is required for this game, and not a single aspect of the gameplay is challenging.

Casual

You have a selection of accessories for your unicorns that are purchased with in-game currency. You have a variety of wings, unicorn horns, and eye ornaments to choose from to customize your unicorns to your liking. This is a cute add-in, but it’s limited. Even with different colors, and accessories, the unicorns themselves don’t stand out that much from one another.

KleptoCorns’ gameplay, at the end of the day, is far too simplistic. I can see it appealing to someone who is into casual gaming. However, even then, it pushes the line of what’s considered entertaining for a casual gamer. Perhaps if I could customize the backgrounds with all the items that are acquired or if it offered more mini-games, and maybe if said games actually added to the progression of the game, I would have enjoyed myself more.

In the end, KleptoCorns scans underwhelming. After about 15 minutes, you’ve seen everything it has to offer. Progression unfolds at a painfully slow pace, and even though I found myself thrust into a world of eye candy, it wasn’t enough to satisfy the craving I had for fun gameplay.