Kill Knight's twin-stick carnage asks an awful lot of you - but it's very much worth it
Robotron: 1084.
Twin-stick shooters are a fascinating contradiction. These are games in which you move and shoot while the hordes attack. They're games that are absolutely composed of hectic overstimulation, of flinging nasty stuff right at you, and yet they're games in which you can often get into the flow of things and find that you've pleasantly zoned out. At heart I suspect this is down to two reasons. One: I often find myself moving through twin-stick arenas in chummy, lazy circles, as if I'm stirring a nice bubbling soup. Two: in these games you generally move and shoot and that's it.
That's not it in Kill Knight. Or rather that is it, but there's a lot to movement and a lot to shooting. This is a twin-stick that all but forces you to play through a stacked wedding cake of tutorials, and with good reason. Enemies are constant in this world, but you're endlessly dangerous - just so long as you know how to be.
So movement. Yes, circles, but get to grips with a two-burst dash, too, which comes with a cooldown. The dash gives you a moment of invulnerability, which is great for enemy attacks that you just need to warp through. Get it learned and you're on your way!
Onto weapons. Sword and gun, sure, but also a get-out-of-jail shotgun that is charged by collecting the stuff enemies scatter behind them as they die. But you can absorb this in a different way if you want to charge up a mega-weapon. And use the mega-weapon on a certain kind of foe and you can burst through its extra defences. Another kind of foe, meanwhile, has weak spots which you need to attack before you can pull off a finisher. Another enemy will flash red, cuing you in to another kind of damage. Then there's active reload, lifted from Gears of War and about time too, but here there's at least three kinds of active reload and they all come with their own reward. And then there's a combo system. And and and...
Reader: I got through the tutorials and I thought: I'm sunk. How am I going to remember any of this? I should have been writing it down! But then I started my first game, I started to shoot and hack at things with my sword and, and - and breathe out. It was all fine.
There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, Kill Knight just urges you along from the start, with its hellish mediaeval death-metalism, everything stained album-art red and all the beasts and horrors scuttling towards you across the granite. It's a lovely world to be really dangerous in.
Secondly, all of the complications in the combat system flow from such simple basics. They're so well channelled. Shoot stuff. Hack at stuff. Dash. I found myself almost playing through a kind of garden of forking decision paths as I went. Run out of ammo, what do I want from the reload this time? Boxed into a corner, do I want to dash or use the shotgun? Sure, there was a bit of Rubik's Cubery to remembering which combination of trigger and bumper and button push I needed, but only a bit. And after a while it was all but completely internalised.
At which point? Well, by then I was stirring soup. I was moving in lazy circles. I was deep in the heart of a horrific world, and I was easily the most awful, hideous, menacing thing within it. Kill Knight is wonderful. It seems to ask a lot, but it gives you much more in return.