Kumoon

Kumoon is a puzzle game that blends in third person shooter gameplay for Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. It was developed by Mayoneez, also known as Mikko Oksalahti. The game uses the Mope physics engine developed by the same person.

Gameplay

In Kumoon, you control a yellow baby chick from a third person view. Controls are fairly simple, consisting of walking around, hovering, pushing objects and shooting. The object of the game is to advance from stage to stage by making all of the red blocks in a level turn into white blocks, and to finish each of the 39 stages with a positive score. Completing a stage with a negative score causes you to lose a life and restart the stage, while losing all three lives gives you a Game Over screen, though this means very little as you can start again from the last level you attempted.

The primary method of turning red blocks white blocks is by shooting them. You have 3 weapons at your disposal throughout the entire game: the shotgun, the grenade launcher, and the revolver. All of these weapons draw from the same ammo reserve, the current score. The revolver is the most basic weapon, firing a single black bullet at the cost of 100 points. The shotgun fires a spray of several small black balls, capable of hitting many more blocks, but at the cost of 500 points. The grenade launcher shoots a shell which explodes, releasing a storm of normal bullets in all directions, also at the cost of 500 points. The first shot in each level, however, is free.

Another method used to turn red blocks white is to push them into the walls. Although touching a red block directly causes you to lose points, you can indirectly move them by pushing a white block into a red block and pushing both. Jostling red blocks, either by making them fall to the ground or dropping blocks onto them from a significant height, will also convert them to white blocks. Each red block you turn white earns you ten points, but you can earn additional points by ricocheting bullets off walls before they strike the block. The gains are significant, allowing you to earn up to 300 points per block converted.

Every five levels, the game sends you to a bonus level. The same general strategy applies except that you are given a set number of pistol, shotgun and grenade rounds with which to earn as many points as possible. Other than that, and the fact that the blocks you must convert are now green instead of red, the bonus rounds are identical to the main game. Aside from helping you build up your score, they often introduce new skills or physics techniques that will be vital to future levels.

Kumoon supports custom levels. The levels are in plaintext format and are easily modified. There is a level syntax document with the levels.

External links

* [http://mayoneez.1g.fi/kumoon/ Kumoon home page]