It’s been quite a few years since the glorious twin-stick shooter over-saturation era of the late 2000s, but thankfully the ancient ways have not been forgotten. Kill Knight aims to revive the glory days of frantic arena battles and lightning-quick twitch reflexes by sending you solo against a horde of angels attacking Hell for some reason. In truth, there isn’t much of a real story to go on here, but you’re not playing a twin-stick shooter to learn a lesson; you’re playing it to dish out some ultra-violence. Kill Knight is more than happy to oblige.

Kill Knight
Developer: PlaySide
Publisher: PlaySide
Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, and PS5
Release Date: October 2, 2024
Players: 1
Price: $14.99

Drenched in early 1990s CRT and neon arcade aesthetics, Kill Knight goes hard on the basics of a few contrasting colors to give an extra pop to splashes of blood that smatter across the stone floors of the Hell arena.

The Kill Knight is also just enough of a different shade of grey and black with pink auras, making it easy to keep track of him even while swimming among a sea of enemies and dodging projectiles.

While this visual style looks impressive at a glance and in trailers, the bright flashes and nuance put the all-too-old familiar strain of my youth on my old man eyes, which limit my play sessions to a few consecutive runs. It’s not a criticism of the game, just a sad realization that time catches up to even the most seasoned gamer.

What makes Kill Knight fun is the challenges the game puts in front of you, giving you a natural path to progress through the game and unlock other weapons, armor, and a trinket that grants you an additional buff, depending on which one you are equipped.

If you’re struggling, repeated playthroughs give coins that you can use to unlock upgrades, so you’re never hard-locked while progressing. The Kill Knight is equipped with dual pistols, a heavy gun, a sword, and a suit of armor. Each upgrade trades one advantage for another, such as pistols that do less damage but fire faster or a heavy gun that shoots a mortar that explodes into a splash damage ring around where it lands.

Armor trade-off grants you mobility for less damage protection, while the sword gives you more damaging melee strikes in exchange for a weaker heavy skill. This makes for a pretty good balance and allows you to optimize your strategy based on the types of enemies you’ll encounter in each of the game’s five stages.

Kill Knight‘s soundtrack also flirts with the old industrial stylings of the late 1980s – as I heard several influences from early Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, and even some Skinny Puppy mixed in while also calling back at the original DOOM score. As a bonus, the music becomes more intense as your power level rises.

While I originally planned to critique the lack of punch in the bass, improving my gameplay also improved the soundtrack. I’d argue that the differences in the sound between intensity three and five are negligible, but I appreciate the attempt to do something unique in an affordable indie title.

However, one glaring issue that needs to be addressed is the lack of rhythm component. The game heavily relies on its reload mechanic to keep the action going, and having the music adapt so that reloading is accomplished on beat would have added a cherry on top of an already pretty tasty sundae.

Speaking of the reload mechanic, Kill Knight utilizes the reload function most popularly known from Gears of War where you have a slider that comes up and you have to hit the button while the slider is in the designated area in order to reload faster, and in this case the button you hit depends on what function happens.

You can absorb the dropped soul gems in order to power up your wraith attack, which is a super powered heavy weapon attack that causes health gems to drop (and this is the only healing mechanic in the game), and pressing that button during reload will cause you to instantly absorb all of the gems on screen.

These gems aren’t absorbed by your ability, which means you must touch them, and while I get that this keeps you from accidentally taking health that you might not need, they expire after a few seconds on screen so it’s just adding difficulty by forcing you to run into the fray to try and survive. This often leads to taking a hit or two trying to grab a health gem that will recover less health than the damage you took.

The game simply ties too many things to this mechanic to make the action more fun than frustrating. While the timing of the reload window is fair, fighting off a horde of enemies and a bullet-hell wave of incoming projectiles, is exceptionally frustrating if you miss the reload window or accidentally hit the melee strike instead of firing a pistol shot for the increased gun damage.

It’s satisfying as hell when you pull it off, but missing it means dropping a combo or sometimes outright dying because you couldn’t get stuff off of you. This is why I said that adding the rhythmic trigger would have been better cause you could have just listened instead of having to take your eyes off the action to focus on hitting the timer.

In fact, having real success in Kill Knight is found by being able to look through the UI while also being cognizant of it. More often than not you’ll see your gems flashing that they’re about to expire and you’ll instinctively suck them up, only to realize that you should have fired two more bullets and then used the vacuum reload trigger, but you didn’t notice because the screen was so busy. The game is super fun and feels great to play, but a few minor quality of life tweaks could take this game to the next level.

One last critique is that Kill Knight seems like it wasn’t quite sure what it wanted to be. It’s five levels of arena survival shooter, but then there’s a boss rush final battle where you’ll fight “the last angel” through multiple phases of combat with a short section of story which probably could have been explained in full with an introductory cutscene when you first launch the game.

While I can appreciate the idea of a Furi styled boss battle, it just feels out of place considering what the rest of the game is. Maybe there was more planned or maybe they just decided that they didn’t know how to make the boss battle fit naturally into the flow of the arena. Maybe they ran out of time and decided it was good enough as it was. I’m not sure, but at $15, it’s hard to penalize them too much over a slightly disjointed final battle.

Kill Knight was reviewed on Steam using a Windows PC with a code provided by PlaySide. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Kill Knight is now available on PC via Steam.