Kill Knight Review

For less than $25 dollarydoos, Kill Knight delivers a tight, balanced and challenging experience most AAAs should be looking to for inspiration. This is definitely the little arcade twin-stick shooter that could!

Proudly made in Australia by independent developer-publisher on the rise, PlaySide Studios, Kill Knight stands very, very tall, despite its small-ish stature. Less a “twin-stick shooter” and more a “twitch-stick shooter”, the game’s high skill ceiling is only countered by its constant tease and addictive gameplay. It is delightfully repetitive in the best possible way, because everything that is repeated allows you to exercise new strats, loadouts, playstyles and more, and this is because said repetition is thick and fast and unrelenting. You’ll certainly remember aspects of each layer, but we highly doubt you’ll know exactly what to expect all the time, unless you’re some kind of super elephant-person hybrid creature.

Oh, and Kill Knight absolutely, positively, without question hates you.

This is because at its core, the game does not want you to succeed. So many games are built precariously around gateway mechanics to promote progression and a sense of achievement, but Kill Knight’s gameplay loop, simple as it is, is more in the camp of “catch me if you can”. There’s a dance and a cadence to proceedings, and whether you choose to lead or follow will be entirely up to you and how you learn to manage those simple systems. And we know it doesn’t want you to succeed because its economy of unlock is so tight-fisted, the term “slow burn” doesn’t even begin to describe the uphill battle before you, which is funny because the game is fucking fast.

Kill Knight

Genre: Twin-Stick Shooter
Developer: PlaySide Studios
Publisher: PlaySide Studios
Release Date: October 2, 2024
Classification: M15+
Author: Stephen Farrelly
Date: October 15, 2024

The Economy of Nearly Dying

Those systems mentioned above are a part of an ingenious economy designed to feed the player with a risk-reward setup of things like health, score and score multiplier, additional active powers and more. How players use these can often determine how you’ll fare onslaught-to-onslaught and with each level change. Yep, that’s right, within each layer, after swarms are cleared, you descend another layer within the ‘layer’ (the game’s term for each level) and every time you do the shape of the arena changes and introduces new challenges. These range from harder enemies, new enemy-types, lasers that can be static or moving, enemies with lasers who also move and oh-so-much more. Remember, this game is out to kill you, Kill Knight.

This means keeping tabs on a few of the things that are in your arsenal, as the game is largely about a hugely limited amount of crowd control and how you keep yourself both alive and powered up. And some of its Challenges, which we’ll get to in a minute, require you to maintain a stayed hand because you can lose momentum when there’s nothing left to kill. (Though these ‘gaps’ in fodder are fleeting, at best, but enough to rock your rhythm.)

"Get too bogged down in trying to build your sword meter for that all-powerful Hyper Drive and you’ll quickly come undone..."

Honestly, the balance with all of this is phenomenally handled and while it’s obvious enemy AI here is simply “swarm, swarm, swarm”, it doesn’t make the baddies any less predictable, and players can become flustered when you start to overthink that economy and how best to utilise it to keep not just yourself alive, but all of your streaks and abilities up and running. Get too bogged down in trying to build your sword meter for that all-powerful Hyper Drive and you’ll quickly come undone. Try too hard to mix up your active reloads and you’ll miss the slower enemies in the thick of the swarm ready to swat you. Attempt to parry a flashing baddie to activate the slow time ability, an you might get cut up by spinning blades and other monstrosities who see a gap in your own actions.

There’s just always so much going on that your overall best strategy out of the gate is to simply listen to audio cues and play on instinct. The thoughtful stuff will naturally come later, just... don’t overthink it.

*Click "Would You Like to Know More?" for... MORE!

Would you like to know more?
While story is lite-on in-game barring a very cool intro cinematic, the studio has stated that you, the "Kill Knight", were once a "loyal knight, betrayed, and banished to the Abyss". Your armour is a reanimated entity guiding you, a "desecrated corpse", towards one goal -- to kill The Last Angel. Very cool. Such simplistic overviews of context and endgame goals are a hallmark of classic 90s arcade and shooter titles from which PlaySide took most of its influence for Kill Knight, and here the team has done it with aplomb.

Frickin’ Lasers

As mentioned above, Kill Knight’s arena changes after each mob or swarm is cleared, and this is a rapid shift requiring knee jerk adjustment. You might be in a fairly spacious area that allows for an almost skating strategy where you carefully choose when to evade in and out of enemies, round them up or just skirt the perimeter. But that space might change to a confined one with lasers you can evade through without taking any HP, or lose a huge chunk of it for not timing your management of them properly. Lasers also don’t affect the baddies, so they don’t care and will just continue to “swarm, swarm, swarm”. What can make these shifts even more intense is when the earlier-mentioned spinning blades also come out, as well as higher tier enemies, plus the bullet hell aspect of certain arachnids that spit fire balls at you. 

It's... a lot.

"It’s a constant battle of just knowing when to hold and when to go and how to manage the economy..."

Management then of all of the above is critical. You gain health shards to regenerate any lost HP, but you can’t get these until you fill your Wrath Burst meter allowing for a massive one-shot that takes out most baddies in front of it. To fill said meter, you need to collect or vacuum up red shards dropped by all enemies upon their demise, and when the Wrath Burst meter is full, you can still collect them, but you can’t suck them up any more until you unleash it, but they vanish, and you might still need to hold out until your rewarded health shards will be in greater number. It’s a constant battle of just knowing when to hold and when to go and how to manage the above economy. It is incredibly hard, especially because your sword meter takes FOREVER to build out, but it’s also so, so good and addictive, it’s hard to fault the game on any of its aspects of balance and reward.

Chromatic Hellscape

There’s little-to-no story here save for the idea you’re a Kill Knight who needs to descend a kind of hell. The game’s presentation which, at first, might seem uninspired and drab is actually a stroke of genius, however, and borrows heavily from arcade titles and other similarly-toned games of the 90s and early noughties. And it helps keep the player focused on the ever-swarming enemies and changing arenas so as not to be distracted by any special kind of eye-candy, for lack of a better term. And it’s not that the game isn’t pretty in its own right -- animations and the number of enemies on-screen at once moving at the speed they do, with the varying types the further you descend is more than enough of a flex for a $25-ish game.

Where it shines most in the presentation department though, is in its audio. The game’s soundtrack -- a 90s-inspired industrial electro joint, accompanies the chaos and dread of it all perfectly, while the also earlier-mentioned audio cues sit within that audioscape seamlessly while also being super helpful once you start to recognise what each stands for.

"That sword meter really, truly needs to be able to be built up faster to allow for players to feel somewhat capable..."

The above is important because while we’ve gushed over the game to this point, it’s not without some areas it could be improved in, such as placement of certain elements of your HUD, some of the UX could have been a bit better to navigate, and that sword meter really, truly needs to be able to be built up faster to allow for players to feel somewhat capable. But of the above, it’s definitely the HUD aspect that could be tweaked. Active reload prompts could be placed higher on the screen and where your multiplier is positioned, right now, means you’re taking your eyes off the action for just that bit too long to keep track of it. A different colour for your Wrath Burst meter wouldn’t go astray, either.

Our first access with the game was on PC with a 27” monitor, which was fine, but upon firing it up on console on an 85” panel, the game became infinitely better to play from a visual perspective (we didn’t test it on Switch in undocked mode, but suspect it would be very difficult). But even the consoles come with gripes. The touchpad button on the PS5 controller is the game’s instant restart button, so if you find yourself slipping off either of the analogue sticks, which happens in this game often enough, you’re whisked out of your current run and back to the start -- which is its own kind of meta hell.

Entangled

Other areas that could be addressed are varying and more dynamic Challenges than the ones presented from the outset, as the second tier we found really difficult to pull off, let alone later ones. Moreover, the earnings per run are so slim players will need to grind and grind for unlocks if they’re struggling with the aforementioned Challenges. A steadier clip of income wouldn’t be unwelcome, and it wouldn’t need to be super easy, just a bit more achievable.

Those gripes aside, the overall product here is still incredibly good. It’s additive as all get up and one that will test your patience to the nth degree, but in a good way. You’ll definitely find yourself muttering “one more go” on more than one occasion, which is the hallmark of a game and team that have nailed that special sauce. Just come into the game not expecting to win right away. It is unrelenting and ferocious in what it throws at you, and as has been peppered throughout here, Kill Knight does not want you to succeed… so don’t give it the satisfaction.

And again, at $25-odd bucks, you could find far worse ways to punish yourself and your life choices than by taking on this beast of a game. They say everything in Australia wants to kill you, right? That Kill Knight is made in Australia then is kind of apt and on-brand for us. Grab it now, so that it can grab you and drag you through hell.

What’s Boss?

  • A budget title with hours, days, weeks and months of gameplay packed into it
  • Ultra-responsive controls
  • Addictive gameplay loop that punishes you beyond the norm, but keeps bringing you back
  • Awesome powers and weapons once you unlock them make you feel like a Kill Knight
  • A brilliantly minimalist presentation that homages games of the 90s and noughties
  • An incredible soundtrack with excellent gameplay audio throughout the experience

Not Boss Enough?

  • The skill ceiling is intimidating and might not be for some
  • The tutorial could include a mini explanation of how best to manage the game's economies
  • Better placement of elements of the HUD could make the experience easier to manage
  • More dynamic Challenges or Objectives to help feed the tight-fisted coffers earnt with each attempt could help punters power up a bit quicker than the game currently allows

Kill Knight is a twin-stick shooter with an incredibly high skill ceiling. Players descend through layers of a hellscape taking on swarms of insectoid-like enemies to build out multipliers, charge powerful weapons and manage a unique health and power-up economy. This is a game not for the faint of heart.

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About the Author

Written By Stephen Farrelly
Stephen Farrelly is a veteran journalist and editor with more than two decades experience in the worlds of gaming, entertainment, lifestyle and sport under his belt. He is a proud pug dad, loves art in all forms but particularly street and tattoo culture, and is the director of Swear Jar...
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