Gryphon Knight Epic Shoot 'Em Up Released For Linux, It’s Pretty Terrible Right Now

I took a look at Gryphon Knight Epic a good looking retro-inspired shoot ‘em up from Cyber Rhino Studios.

Disclosure: Key provided to us.

About the game (Official)
Gryphon Knight Epic is a 2D Medieval Shoot’em up that mixes elements from classical shoot’em ups, exploration and duel-like boss battles, it tells the story of Sir Oliver and Aquila, an accomplished knight and his loyal gryphon that are forced back to adventure once again.

Sir Oliver have already defeated a dragon, married a princess and saved the kingdom. But during his quest he will face adversaries he never imagined he would, because… in reality all of them were once friends. What happened? These heroes would never go rogue… and all at once? Something is rotten in the kingdom and its up to Oliver discover what.

My thoughts
I was really excited to play Gryphon Knight Epic as it really reminded me of some classics I played as a child, but it doesn’t quite live up to my expectations.

The first annoyance: The game refuses to change resolution in-game and it defaults to a tiny resolution that looks terrible. When I try to change it I end up with a screen like below. It's not just that my language changed by itself, but the graphics vanished too, oh my.


I tried a second time to change the resolution, but this time from the main menu and it just did nothing.

I loaded it a third time, and the start screen was this:


After that, my language was stuck on that setting. Very annoying, and unplayable like that.

The next annoyance is that the gamepad controls are based on numbered buttons, like “1,2,3,4,5,6” rather than “X, A, Y, B” and it made learning the controls rather annoying. I’ve not seen a game do this in years, and it wasn’t very nice.

During the first section of the game it tells you to go down when the floor opens up to continue, but no amount of moving down or pressing any combination of buttons worked. So, I could not actually get past the initial “tutorial” level.

I have reported these issues to the developer. Honestly though, how these issues weren’t seen during testing is beyond belief. I know we are supposed to give people a little leeway here, but when it’s this bad it feels like zero testing was done on Linux.

Final thoughts: Steer well clear, until they test it properly on Linux and fix it up. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.