Fast paced twin-stick shooter mixing shooting with melee and heavy resource management. Seemingly inspired by Devil Daggers & Hyper Demon it leans more into endurance-based challenges rather than bite-sized levels with large enemy or boss fight variety. On top of a high level of challenge the game has a focus on score attacking with a polished system to match. If you like challenging twin-stick shooters and also pushing for high scores this should be an especially easy sell. If not, you might like it simply because it's a hectic top-down action game that does a solid job mixing up ranged and melee attacks. The game is mechanically dense right from the get-go which can be the first turnoff to some. You have many resources to manage. With the caveat that some mechanics can be ignored while still performing well: perfectly timed pistol reloads or walking over small items for speed ups may look central at first but you don't need to worry about them much. Ammo gauges encourage a varied usage of tools similar to Doom Eternal to keep each ability available. Core reloads being tied to meleeing enemies or aggressively collecting dropped items. For movement you have access to an invincible dash/roll like many similar top-down games. The dash is much less overpowered than say in Nex Machina. It's something you should think of as another resource to manage rather than autopiloted: especially on more challenging modes. You might also use up dash stocks to cancel the recovery of a melee slash or to get in for one, making your defense weaker for a moment. You can totally get cornered and take a bunch of damage for poor positioning. On the highest difficulty the most basic melee-type enemies move a little faster than your walk speed which should be telling. Kill Knight is somewhat lacking in level variety. You mostly fight the same enemies again but with different environmental hazards or a longer endurance stage. Rather than unique enemies or bosses popping up often. The environmental hazards can be cool though, as the stages transform over time and often restrict your movement. There is a gear system to change your weapons (two ranged, one melee) on top of an armor piece and accessory. If you change all three weapons it can feel like playing an entirely different character. The different 'heavy' weapons range from high power single shot shotguns to long range machineguns and have completely different matching Wrath Burst attacks (which are the only way to spawn health items). These can really change your methods of healing or taking down heavy targets. Some of the armors give you a new attack tied to the dash which can add a whole new layer to things. Generally playstyle variety isn't massive but the synergies between equipment can be fun to play with. Kill Knight has a very solid scoring system up there with things like Assault Android Cactus. Scoring seems like a major focus of the design of the game instead of an afterthought. Picking up health items at max health gives you bonus points making them double as score items. You spawn these at a more rapid pace the better you use your Wrath Burst weapon. This spawning of crystals / score items by precisely destroying groups of enemies can be really satisfying and reminds me more of the scoring systems in arcade scrolling shooters rather than your average twin-stick. The nice part here being this skill for score attack is also the best for survival: more healing items are spawned. But do you want to risk moving all around the stage to collect them? On top of other score bonuses the time bonus in each stage is very significant so optimizing your clear times to be faster is always relevant (again similar to AAC). Nailing all the scoring tricks, using melee efficiently, not taking hits and beating the stage quickly is an impossible task to pull off perfectly. But the closer your gameplay gets to that it certainly feels and looks cool. When you first boot up the game and if it clicks at all it's clear that the skill ceiling is high and there's cool stuff to do: the scoring system matches this very well. Using normal sword swings may seem like pointless strategy at first as melee is somewhat risky. But melee becomes more relevant the further you optimize stages or complete the matching Carnage challenges. The sword gauge built up by melee kills is used for full screen bomb type attacks which award you the more enemies you clear out at once. In a way this increased focus on melee makes the game more difficult (even after beating the highest difficulty!) but also gives you constant reloads on your heavy weapon, making the playstyle efficient if done right. At the time of review many gear loadouts & playstyles are valid for high scores: someone using Sword 2 to absorb bullets for extra meter gain, some pushing the time bonus to its limits with Heavy 3, another using perfect reloads more than others and so on.
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