Mokoko is an Arcade styled Puzzle game in the vein of the classic 1981 title Qix. In it, we play as some robocop looking bloke on a mission to protect eight girls from various threats throughout 24 increasingly difficult levels. Each of those stages have their own unique enemies that will never be used again. They have their own attacks, stage layout, stories, and even voice acting. This makes every encounter quite memorable as you not only have to contend with their different methods of taking you down, but also with a communist ant calling you chauvinist scum.
I.. am just as confused by that statement as you are. The enemies have more lore to them than you’d expect from a hentai puzzle game. It contains both their life’s story, as well as their relationship and motivations for why they are after the girl. Each girl has three threats/levels that fall within a theme. Some are afraid of insects and others are hunted by aquatic creatures. Other than that, logic & reason are thrown out the window with these bizarre foes. Reading through their lore feels like an exercise in trying to retain your sanity, as you process the words you’ve seen and try to understand them. So basically the Necronomicon in video game form.
As strange as it is, this does add a lot of personality. Some of them are quite chuckle-worthy too, like the scorpion that riffs on freemium mobile games. There is an overall story too, detailing the background of your character piece by piece. You unlock more of his lore after each girl you save from their three threats. If this seems like far too much narrative for your liking, it is all completely optional. There are no downsides to going into a level blind. In fact, you’ll likely be just as, if not more confused after reading through it. All that matters is the level difficulty ranging from Easy, Medium, and Hard. As you crank up that difficulty, you’ll start with fewer lives, deal with faster enemies, and need to clear more of the screen before being granted victory.
This brings us into the gameplay. Your basic goal is to capture territory by connecting a line with zones that you already own. Starting off, you own nothing, so you have to draw a line to and from the edges of the screen. You can choose to play it safe and only take small chunks of land at a time, or be ballsy with your tactics and try to take half of the screen from the get-go. Bigger land grabs will grant you more points, while smaller claims equate to far less. It doesn’t matter what shape or how screwed up your line is, as long you manage to connect it to something. Trapping an enemy within the territory you capture will destroy them and remove them from the playing field, making your life that much easier.
The danger with the trying to make land grabs is that if an enemy ever touches the line before you reach safety, a projectile will be injected into it and shoot straight for your character. We are not all that fast. If we are not already close to friendly territory, that unavoidable projectile will more than likely spell our doom. Enemy pattern recognition and planning is a key factor to master in this game. Thanks to our slow movement speed, blindly darting off in a direction will simply lead to death more often than not. Sometimes, we have to risk everything and do exactly that, however. Your shield is steadily depleting and if it runs out, any foe that touches your character will destroy him, even if you are within your own territory. Better to make a desperate run than to wait for your demise.
Getting more land will slightly refill your shield, though that energy is always ticking down. It gets pretty darn intense, especially as stages get more complex later on. You will have unpassable question-mark boxes that limit where you can go or connect to, traps, and an online leaderboard tempting you to make risky maneuvers for bigger points. The fact that every stage has unique enemies ensures you will always be on your toes and unable to fall into relying on a single strategy. How to deal with them can vary wildly. Some will drop webs that greatly slow you down, others will shoot out projectiles in an attempt to nail you from afar, and others simply bounce around the screen at great speeds. It is so much fun trying to one-up them. Particularly since they will be mocking you throughout. It is definitely a good thing you can easily and quickly mute them though. On levels giving you trouble, it can quickly start to grate on you.
It is far from an easy title. I’ve played through on the Medium difficulty and let me tell you, I have not held my breath this much in quite some time. There are few things more intense than waddling your slow character through a minefield of enemies on your last life than seeing one directly heading towards you. Trading in the big points you’d make from capturing a large swathe of land with taking tiny ones can come with its own advantages. Enemies can not get across your territory, so you can strategically box them in or guide their movements away from your objective with well placed small territories. At the end of a level, you get shown the top 100 players for it, to encourage you to try again or refine your strategy.
As for the hentai aspect of this title, it is underwhelming. It is very much drowned out by the weird arse lore entries and the addictive gameplay. With each of the three threats a girl is faced with, she will undress more and more after you continuously defeat them. You can see more of the pic as you claim territory. Yet that is easily ignored as you have much more on your plate at any given moment to take the time to view it. It is not a reward really, you already saw the full picture from the moment you met her on the menu screen. In future stages, neither her pose nor the environment changes, more clothes are simply removed. To get full nudity, you need to download the free uncensor DLC. I wouldn’t call its inclusion bad, but whether the hentai is your reason for wanting to get this title or avoiding it, that feature is about as relevant to things as collecting feathers in Assassins Creed.
From the girl’s menu, you can change her expression and remove the clothing to whatever point your mission progress will allow. There is no way to enter fullscreen to view the art or resize it. With eight characters to ogle, you do have a decent variety within them. Once you’ve conquered all of the 24 levels, a new Arcade mode will be unlocked. It will task you with essentially beating the entire game in one go, at the difficulty of your choosing. Thanks to how unique each stage is, this mode is a ton of fun to put what you’ve learned to the test. That, in addition to the online leaderboards and multiple difficulty modes, gives one quite the incentive to keep on playing after you initially finish it. Mokoko offers a ton of content for its four-dollar price tag. It spices things up with lewd anime waifus, but at its heart, this is an arcade-style, gameplay focused affair. The type of hentai title where you can legitimately tell your friends ‘I am only playing it for the gameplay, I swear’.
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