There are games that instantly grab your attention with their cool concepts, great stories and flashy looks. And there are games that just feel flat-out silly. The new party brawler, Kiln, definitely falls into that latter category. But Kiln just might be the odd little pottery game that, uh, fires up your next gathering.
You play as a little blobby spirit thingy that is keen to jump into 4×4 multiplayer battles. Each online contest—between four teams with four members each—is established on maps with pathways, obstacles, health boosts, disco floors, moving areas, water sources and four large pottery kilns representing each team’s color. (There are five different maps offered at the time of writing, with more promised.) And the goal of the competition is to see which team can quench the enemies’ kilns while protecting their own. Last kiln standing—or, rather, burning—wins.
Think of it as a tower defense game with pots. Pots? Uh huh.
Your little blobby spirit thingies can’t fight or hold water with their little blobby arms, so they turn to pottery. Players plop a chunk of clay onto a pottery wheel and create the best pot, bowl, vase or plate their imagination can come up with. (The process is fairly intuitive, and it requires no prior pottery skill.) Then your spirit thingy can slip on that pot or plate like a suit of clothes and take it into water-splashing battles.
However, all pots are not created equal.
Gamers need to figure out the right balance between their crafted vessel’s sturdiness and its capacity to hold water (a key component to dousing enemy kilns). A large bowl may hold the most gathered fluid but move slowly and be easily broken. Whereas a stout, thick-walled pot might be able to bash opponents with weighty oomph but carry very little to quench a kiln’s fire. After crafting your pieces, you can glaze and decorate your favorites and save the best designs for repeated use.
From there it’s all about teamwork and strategic movements as you and your mates divide up the kiln-splashing or kiln-protecting duties. The bashing battles between opposing pottery can also be augmented with a variety of exaggerated weapon abilities such as wielding a drill, an oversized cactus, a bullhorn and the like. Each ability can only be used for brief moments of bashing.
Kiln is designed to be a rollicking, multiplayer party game that requires an online connection. Local co-op play is not supported. Players can be teamed with random online players, or they can invite friends to join their team.
The game is fast, colorful and quirky. And while the battle pots can be shattered, players simply go fetch a new clay vessel to continue with. The breakable pottery pieces simply act as the armor to your little blobby spirit thingy.
The biggest learning curve of the game is figuring out which pottery type and build works best for your playstyle.
There is quite a lot of thumping melee battling between pots, vases and plates in the game, but nothing messy or disturbing.
The biggest issue for younger players, however, is the rare use of the word “bada–.” There’s also some light potty humor featuring the bare backside of the player’s spirit creature and some stickers that depict dirty socks and a cartoony rear end. Players may also shape their pottery in creative ways that could potentially be sexually suggestive.
Parents should consider that this title’s gameplay is all online. And players can be teamed up with friends and random players. In an effort to keep the environment “friendly,” the game purposely does not integrate a native chat function. But depending on the console it’s played on, system chat functions can be applied.
Kiln is a multiplayer tower defense game filled with lots of quirky fun for players of all ages. Oh, and handmade pots. Lots of pots. Just keep in mind that there’s no local co-op play in the clay-molding mix.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
