Kamikaze Veggies Gameplay Preview

Kamikaze Veggies is sort of a puzzle platformer where you play as sentient vegetables fighting against evil red vegetables trying to take over the world. The vegetables can also blow themselves up, hence the name of the game.

While the premise of the game sounds rather silly, the game is surprisingly devoid of any personality. From the level design to the game mechanics, everything feels rather generic and lacking any sort of inspiration. On any given level, the layout doesn’t really reflect any theme or establish a set piece. It just feels like blocks randomly placed on a small island. Even the color palette of the levels seem to be chosen without much forethought.

The game mechanics seem to be a hodgepodge of randomly thrown together elements as well. In one level, you may be doing a slider puzzle. In another, you’re throwing electrons at moving gears. There’s no real sense of progression or depth and nuance to the kamikaze mechanic because it’s used in the same way in every level. You just use the kamikaze to blow open a door or destroy an objective at the end of the level. They just add in random mini puzzles to do throughout the level and the puzzles themselves don’t really build off of each other as well, they are simple one offs.

That said, the game does provide an old school sort of fun. I’ve been playing re-releases of older console games such as Stubbs the Zombie and Freedom Fighters and two things really stuck out to me. The first was that the games were just simple fun with no gimmicks and the constant, needless grind of meaningless progression found often in modern game design. The second was that the level design itself was very simple. They were oftentimes just large open spaces or a series of linear corridors.

In this sense, Kamikaze Veggies hearkens back to simpler times, whether by design or just coincidence I will leave to the reader to decide. There’s a decent amount of fun to be had collecting all the treasures, defeating the enemy vegetables, and trying to score three stars on each level. There are currently six levels in the early access version, which should take anywhere from three to four hours to complete.

Overall, while Kamikaze Veggies feels like it lacks any sort of personality to me, I still managed to have some fun playing the game. It could definitely benefit from a more cohesive vision to the game design. The levels could benefit from a facelift and the game mechanics could be better designed around the kamikaze abilities and build off of them instead of throwing in random mini puzzles.