KurtzPel Early Access Gameplay Impressions: Anime PvP & PvE Brawler

KurtzPel is a game about slicing, dicing, shooting arrows and fireballs, running around like crazy and just beating the crap out of your opponents. Oh, and you also get to create your dream waifu if you feel so inclined. KurtzPel is now available in free Early Access, so hit that link in the video description and start downloading.

But first things first: KurtzPel is going through a phased release in order to optimize the servers before moving on to the next region. The current release is specifically for North America and South America, with Europe coming in early June and Asia in early July. So, yes, you can say that the game is region locked… for maybe a month or two? This doesn’t strike me as a problem, but haters gonna hate.

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I’ll be completely honest here: no one seemed too pleased with the way that KurtzPel only had two Karmas available at the start. Having played the alpha in all its four Karma glory, this felt like a downgrade that was inevitably tied to the monetization. The same thing goes for the purchasable Rebirth tickets with its stat allocation, something that free players couldn’t use. But lo and behold, KOG listened to player feedback and proceeded to unlock the Blazing Fist and Diabolic Witch Karmas and promised to add a stat allocation system for all players soon. Now that is what I call listening to your players, well done!

KurtzPel is more than a waifu simulator – it is a PvP focused anime brawler with a boss battle PvE mode featuring some secondary characters that Grand Chase fans may recognize. The story mode in KurtzPel is slim but it’s not to be ignored, and you can think of it as an anime Dauntless – this is the place that you should go to learn the ropes and face some cool bosses in the process. It’s not just the design that impresses, it’s the range of special attacks and versatile tactics that require different approaches and clever tactics to succeed. When the difficulty rises and you’re joined by a friend in two-player co-op boss raids, the need to strategize becomes even more apparent. A clever use of the Karmas is crucial to overcome these often lengthy boss battles.

But while you can have a lot of fun taking down these huge creeps with a friend, KurtzPel is mostly about PvP and destroying your human opponents. The game is fast and a ton of fun, but if you’re not used to the genre or you are a terrible player, plain and simply, you’ll face some frustrating moments as you blame it for being crushed, getting stun lock and so on. The truth is that it will happen, but you must deal with it – you have Breaker and Slayer classes for some reason, so get that teamwork going and use this to your advantage, instead of crying about it. I’m not the greatest PvP player and yet I’ve experienced some truly magnificent flashes of cooperation with my partner without even speaking a word to one another.

What about the four Karmas available right now? Despite the justified player outrage about only having two Karmas to begin with, the Dance of Wind and Sword Taliah were my favorite combo anyway, but I appreciate the fact that everyone has a larger choice right now. I love picking foes from a distance with the crossbow and suddenly moving up close with my greatsword to unleash a chain of devastating swipes. I kind of like the power of the Diabolic Witch as well, but the downside is that the attacks are extremely slow and easy to dodge, something that makes all the difference in PvP. As for the Blazing Fists… well, I wouldn’t trade my sword for these gauntlets, but maybe you will. Next in line are Dual Swords, which sounds very interesting to me.

Being in Early Access right now, KurtzPel doesn’t offer boatloads of content, so to speak. You have three PvP game modes in a handful of maps: Conquest, Capture the Flag and Deathmatch. However, it receives frequent updates since its alpha, has new PvE bosses and PvP maps in the making, besides the fifth Karma that I just mentioned.

What KurtzPel needed was a solid, fun and fast-paced combat system, so that it could grow from there. That it does, absolutely, and now it’s a matter of ironing out some of the bugs and the inevitable lag issue, create more compelling content and further improve on the social features. It also helps that KurtzPel looks really good, extremely vivid and colorful, a nice change from the usual drab and monotonous art style that we see in so many MMOs.

If you have any interest whatsoever in competitive anime brawlers, I advise you to jump into KurtzPel early on, because it will be so cool to show off your badass skills to new, flabbergasted players that are late to the party. Hit the link in the description to download the game and have fun!