Kill Knight Hands-On: The Ultimate Twin-Stick Action Game

ign.com:

You’ve never played a twin-stick shooter quite like Kill Knight. This relentlessly intense action game may indeed be based around firing off a steady stream of projectiles as enemies swarm in, forcing you to dodge and shimmy your way to every corner of the game’s tightly enclosed arenas, but you also wield a sword – which itself feeds into the game’s (at least initially) overwhelming set of mechanics.

Kill Knight is a densely layered twin-stick shooter, in other words, but it’s been designed that way with a very clear purpose – to sort the wheat from the chaff. This is a return to old school arcade sensibilities; a straight-up high score chaser anchored in twin-stick shooter traditions, but also owing a lot to the likes of Dark Souls, Hyper Demon, and Doom Eternal. It is ruthlessly exacting, but never unfair, with over the top action and a skill ceiling that seemingly reaches up forever.

It’s also, thankfully, a whole lot of fun. The learning curve is undoubtedly steep, but I found myself quickly sucked in by the chunky, satisfying feel of Kill Knight’s frenetic combat – not to mention its elegant interlocking mechanics, striking lo-fi brutalist aesthetic, grim mood and killer soundscape.

Playing Kill Knight is a whirling dervish of death, a high-speed mix of swords and gunplay, counters, and supercharged screen clears. It is a game in which wave upon wave of enemies constantly crowds in, forcing you into perpetual motion, dashing to reposition, lining up your most powerful attacks and kiting mobs to create just enough breathing room to clear them out.

Kill Knight has no procedural randomness, so each of the five levels (or Eldritch Layers, as the game rather poetically calls them) unfolds the same way each time, playing host to the same overwhelming horde in the same order. They’ll spawn in different places depending on where you are on the killing floor, and you don’t necessarily need to complete a wave for the next one to start (there are key targets that act as