There’s something incredibly nostalgic about Kill Knight. It takes me back to childhood weekends in Timezone, dropping coins into Gauntlet Legends with my friends. I can almost hear the coins dropping into the machine and smell the cheap-as pizza slices every time I fire up Kill Knight and start hacking and slashing.
Kill Knight, designed by Melbourne-based Playside Studios (Age of Darkness: Final Stand, Dumb Ways to Die) is a blood-soaked love letter to the days of the arcade twin-stick shooter, and if it were an arcade machine it would be eating all my pocket money.
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Hell Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
Kill Knight has a very strong visual style, and it’s definitely geared towards old-school twin-stick players. The game has a highly detailed yet slightly pixelated style, and a repetitive thrumming musical score that immediately gives you that arcade feeling. The menus even have a slight curve and scan lines that make the game look like it’s running on a CRT.
Across the game’s five levels, the mission is simple: kill monsters, keep moving. Your tools are dual primary pistols, a heavy shotgun and a sword to start with and unlock others later.
Each level evolves over a run. You’ll start on a square platform with insectoids crawling up the sides, then before long, you’ll be in a tight corridor or dodging between pillars with sentient spiked disks bouncing around you. There are also environmental traps like lasers that need to be dodged through.
As you fight through each level, the floor will become dynamically splattered with blood, which follows perfectly your sword swings and shots. The level might start perfectly clean, but before long, the arena looks like Jackson Pollock had a fistfight in a jam doughnut factory.
I Need Guns, Lots Of Guns
Beyond your core attacks, there are a lot of systems here that are all connected either to feed into one another or offer benefits and drawbacks. For instance, as you kill enemies, they’ll drop red orbs; you can collect these to increase the power of your pistols. Or you can suck them up to charge the special attack of your secondary weapon. That special attack has high damage and breaks enemy armour, but it’s also the only way to collect health orbs.
There’s also an active reload system, similar to Gears of War, but with a twist. You’ll get different effects depending on the key you press while reloading. Hitting melee does a radial sweep attack for clearing enemies. Hitting the absorb key will suck in all the gems nearby — this is a very interesting development on an old mechanic that’s gotten a bit stale. Active reload seems to be in every shooter these days by default, but taking that mechanic and twisting it feels like a great evolution — it’s quite refreshing.
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Likewise, the guns are very responsive, movement feels great and the enemies explode in that oh-so-satisfying splat. This feels like a game that started as a tech demo for a very tidy combat system, and the rest is wrapped around it.
I’m unsure if a state exists between completely zen and utterly zoned out, but I got there. My eyes were unfocused, my fingers bouncing from key to key in a balletic symphony of blood and viscera.
Kill Knight features unlockable weapons, primary and secondary, blades, and armour to alternate with your first set. Each weapon has challenges associated to chase down. This is a very slow progression, though, so expect that you’ll be using the first kit for some time before getting any new weapons.
There is a nice option for unlocking these weapons; each has an achievement to complete to unlock your weapons, or you can save up your coins and buy them.
We’re Not Alone Down Here
Whenever a new enemy appears, you’ll promptly lose your mind for a second. You already have enough enemies to deal with, bullets flying everywhere and no health left, and then some multi-armed bipedal monstrosity claws up the side of the map asking if you’re happy with your car insurance.
I am, and I’ll have none of what you’re selling buddy – shotgun, BLAM!
The game is built for top scores and speed runs — every run is the same, with levels changing and enemies spawning consistently. So, over multiple runs, you’ll get to know the enemies and cadence of spawning beasties to help you prepare.
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This repetition could be a downside for some players. If you don’t gel with the hard-as-nails difficulty, you could bounce off Kill Knight. But the game feels designed for a very particular player. It’s not trying to convert Animal Crossing players into hardened demon hunters. It’s playing to a nostalgia of the arcade and a gamer who’d longed for the days of ordering a pizza and swapping the controller over after each grizzly death.
Kill Knight is definitely designed for a controller. A splash screen even states, “Real knights use a joypad.” First, trying on the mouse and keyboard threw me for a loop. Melee attack on V? What a ridiculous thing to remember when you’ve run out of shotgun ammo.
To Hell And Back
There’s a great deal of Hades DNA here, as well as older arcade games like Gauntlet Legends (for my 90s Timezone kids). But the game that felt the most connected to me was Devil May Cry. Like Dante from Capcom’s demonic epic, you’ll dual-wield pistols akimbo and dash and slice your way up a kill streak to land atop the leaderboards.
However, the Hades comparison might not be in Kill Knight’s favour. One issue that fell flat for me was the context of the whole adventure. I get the impression that our Kill Knight is fighting his way into deeper levels of a hellish space. Though, the whole conceit doesn’t help set the scene beyond a basic story screen at the start. The enemies are all strange mutated insectoids and other creatures, but they could just as easily be ghosts, blobs, or any other random monster. I’d love a bit more context setting; in Hades, the thing that kept me doing more rounds apart from the stellar combat was the additional story and interactions that happened between levels.
Kill Knight is a game that will kick you to the curb if you aren’t paying attention. It’s hard as nails but never unfair. If you die in a run, you just need to dust off your guns and do better.
Quest Daily scores Kill Knight:
8/10
Kill Knight out now on PC via Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch and retails for around $20 AUD.
A review copy of Kill Knight was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this review.
