Kill Knight is a top-down, isometric, twin-stick action game from PlaySide Studios. Being a team from Melbourne Australia with a long history of developing mobile games, with a more casual leaning, Kill Knight marks a stark new direction for PlaySide. Not only is this a highly polished console and PC release, but it is one of the most brutally tough games I have played in a while, which, in and of itself, is a risky play.
When you choose to make a challenging experience, you put a giant microscope on the game’s core mechanics and game-play loops because when you more or less require the player to develop a mastery over mechanics in order to progress, those mechanics need to be worth mastering. So it’s safe to say PlaySide took the path less traveled with their first foray beyond the realm of mobile, but did they come out on the other side with a great game?
Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Hell yes. Let me explain.
All the Evil Hell Can Conjure
In Kill Knight you play as the titular Knight whose job it is to titularly Kill everything in sight. Outside of a short opening animatic showing you descending into Avernus, there is not much to chew on here, narratively speaking. It’s just simply not that type of game. But just because there is no real story, it doesn’t mean the game is bland. It’s got a pretty unique visual style with smart use of contrast and brutalist architecture on display in its depiction of what hell would look like if its sole purpose was to send waves of enemies at a gun-wielding demon-slaying machine.
Speaking of demons, there is a decent variety of enemy types, each offering different ways in which they try to kill you. However, they do all seem to be generically cut from the same cloth. That being said, their silhouettes are unique enough to where you can easily pick them apart on the battlefield and adjust your plan of attack accordingly, which I feel is the most important thing in a game like this.
On top of that, all the demon slaughtering that you will be partaking in happens as your auditory senses are getting blissfully bombarded with some seriously heart-pumping, Doom-core EDM tunes. So while it will be easy to forget the narrative aspects of Kill Knight, the team at PlaySide has definitely crafted an aesthetic and a vibe that is a memorable one.
The Student…
The main course here, though, is absolutely the game-play. Now, there are quite a few top-down, isometric, twin-stick action games, so it can be a challenge to really stand out. In Kill Knight you have some pretty standard ways to dispatch the demons of hell, including a primary fire that is weaker but has plentiful ammunition, a heavier weapon that is more powerful with less ammunition, and a melee attack because what kind of self-respecting Knight doesn’t have a sword?
While this is fun, it is also very similar on the surface to many of its genre contemporaries. On top of that, having no juicy narrative hook to suck you in, you’d figure it would be very hard to stand out. Yet Kill Knight absolutely does, as it is able to find a ton of mechanical depth with a little help from some of its friends (its friends being DOOM Eternal and Gears of War). To best explain this, I think it makes sense to do a quick history lesson:
DOOM Eternal and Gears of War have something in common, and that is that their game-play loops are best in class for their perspective perspectives. Two major pieces that make these loops so special are DOOM Eternal‘s ammo economy system and the Active Reload system from Gears of War (source: me)
Now that we are back, yes, Kill Knight borrows quite liberally from these two mechanics, and the result is a quite satisfying amount of depth. This is great because that basic flow of combat I mentioned earlier will probably keep you alive for around 2 minutes. In order to survive, the game rather forcefully pushes you towards partaking in the game’s deeper combat mechanics.
…Becomes The Master
For instance, your heavy weapon does a lot of damage, but its ammo capacity is quite scarce, and ammo can only be gained from melee kills. So if you want to keep that topped up, you need to be in melee range, which is obviously dangerous. However, there is another way to do this more safely via active reload. For the uninitiated, the active reload mechanic in Gears of War is a very quick-timing mini game that happens every time you reload your weapon, and if you press the reload button at the correct time during the reload animation, you gain bonus damage.
However, active reload in Kill Knight is more than just a quick-timing mini game as you need to be constantly making split second decisions as well. Simply tapping the reload button again at the right time will gain you bonus damage on your primary weapon, but if you press the melee button instead at the right time, you will do a more powerful dashing melee attack that not only restores some heavy ammo, but also has the added benefit of doing so much more effectively and safely.
Another mechanic comes from the blood gems that enemies drop when they die. Picking these up by walking over them will level up your character during that specific run, increasing your damage and movement speed. Alternatively, pressing yet another different button during an active reload will allow you to vacuum them up and convert them into “Wrath,” which is the resource you need to perform the game’s biggest damaging attacks. Some enemies can only be damaged with Wrath attacks as well, so balancing collecting blood gems for more damage and movement speed vs. refilling the wrath meter is constantly on top of mind as you are consistently on your back foot, trying to survive the constant waves of hellspawn running you down.
Those are just two of many examples of how mechanics work together. Throw in things like movement and dashing, environmental hazards, deflecting projectiles with melee attacks, parrying, and much more, and you are just immediately put in a pressure cooker as swarms of enemies are trying to rip you to shreds while you are at the same time focusing on your resources, active reload timing, and constantly making micro decisions about the best way to approach the enemy composition currently being thrown at you. The loop is 50% white knuckle action, 50% cerebral, and 100% some of the most fun you can have in a game like this. It definitely has the patented “one more run” quality that is very important in a game like this.
Dressed for Hell
The game itself, on paper, only has 5 levels, and each level is only around 10 minutes long. So, theoretically, you “could” beat the game in around an hour. In reality, that’s not really the case as I don’t even think that video game player of the century, Billy Mitchell, could pull that off. There is a very satisfying path to mastery that you will have to traverse to reach the credits here, a path which is greatly aided by a pretty robust tutorial system. Along with several difficulty options and leader boards, I feel like the game definitely gives you your money’s worth.
There is also a very nice in-game progression system that sees you unlocking several new weapons that make big changes to how the game plays, along with different gear sets that provide passive bonuses that also shake up the game play. None of these are objectively more powerful than the base set, but they all offer different ways to play with their own pros and cons. All of the unlocks are challenge-based as well, providing different micro goals to try and go for during each run; however, some of these goals are quite challenging. Thankfully, you also will slowly accumulate a currency during your runs, which you can use to unlock anything that has a challenge that you do not want to attempt. A nice little sprinkle of rogue-lite never hurt anyone, now did it?
Hell Yes
Providing the same great feeling that the excellent combat/resource generating dance DOOM Eternal is famous for while also leveling up the active reload system from Gears of War, Kill Knight offers some of the most visceral and cerebral combat the genre has ever seen. It’s a video-game-ass-video-game that we quite frankly don’t get enough of these days.
