KILL KNIGHT Review — Terrorizing Hell

KILL KNIGHT is a bullet hell title that challenges you to fight your way, going as deep into the circles of hell as you can, inevitably dying a glorious death and racking up as many demon kills as possible along the way.

The bullet hell genre has long been one that slept under my radar. It recently came into popularity with titles like Vampire Survivors and the many games it has since inspired. If you want an immediate comparison of what playing KILL KNIGHT is like, you wouldn’t be too far off imagining the Survivors-like games that have popularized the genre, but it is slightly different.

Generally, games in the bullet hell genre take more of a passive approach to gameplay. Once again, making the Vampire Survivors comparison, these games usually have automated attacks, challenging you to run around a static map as the game fights for you, racking up a lot of points and leveling up to unlock more passive attacks and abilities.

KILL KNIGHT immediately challenges this norm by being a decidedly active kind of game. Every attack, be it your special weapons or basic pistol fire, must be manually executed by the player. Dashing and precision blocking also find their way into KILL KNIGHT’s combat, immediately making the game feel more active, exciting, and violent than other games popular in the genre.

While KILL KNIGHT has a variety of active mechanics and gear to swap out, which change how you play the game, I would say generally the gameplay lacks a lot of variety when compared to other popular titles in the genre.

Specifically, KILL KNIGHT does not feature any perk pickups or special powers from leveling up, which is typical in other popular games of this genre. It does use the familiar XP-pickups-on-kills system but trades any special abilities or power-ups for a flat increase in speed and damage.

I would argue that the game would benefit greatly from a mechanic like this. So many aspects of the game are already so cool and exciting; seeing how the developers would implement different abilities and gameplay mutations into the titular KILL KNIGHT’s arsenal would be fascinating. I also feel that, although the mechanics are fairly varied, they do grow pretty boring throughout a run. I would have liked to have these mechanical mutations to keep things interesting.

On the other hand, that really isn’t the kind of game KILL KNIGHT is trying to be. It wants you to master the mechanics quickly, then compete to earn the best score in each level and difficulty against a leaderboard of other players trying for the same thing. An RNG mechanic offering different power-ups can, arguably, conflict with this idea a lot.

Whether or not I feel that KILL KNIGHT could use some additional mechanics, the game is fun to play and has an incredibly solid identity.

KILL KNIGHT goes for this gory, hellish look paired with retro aesthetics that give it a lot of life. Whether it’s in the game’s menus, which look dated yet, have a strange, intimidating factor that makes me feel like my copy of the game might be haunted, or in the dapper pixelated look of each demon and our KILL KNIGHT themselves.

The game maintains a fantastic look with its retro-horror aesthetic and still manages to be highly readable. There was never a time when I didn’t see an attack coming or failed to recognize an enemy or projectile, nor was there any other incident that made me feel like the game sacrificed my ability to play for aesthetics. I think the game strikes a perfect balance between looks and readability, which is sometimes hard for these great-looking games.

As I mentioned above, KILL KNIGHT is an arcade-style bullet hell that challenges you to take on each of its progressively harder levels with your score in mind. You see how many enemies you can defeat, gather points as you do, and then compare those points on a global leaderboard that tracks completion time, difficulty, equipment, and more.

As far as single-player progression goes, you have a relatively large set of gear that alters your attacks and abilities, which can be unlocked by completing challenges while you’re killing hellspawn. These challenges usually amount to something along the lines of “kill 200 enemies using overcharged pistols” and similar tasks and then unlock the use of new gear like weapons and clothing (which, again, are mechanical mutations) for your next run.

Between that and trying to complete each circle of hell the game presents to you, I’d say that KILL KNIGHT features a pretty hefty amount of single-player goals to accomplish before the game becomes wholly focused on leaderboard climbing.

While not everyone is into arcade-style, leaderboard-chasing games, it’s fair to say it’ll take you a long time to get to a point where the only thing still challenging you in KILL KNIGHT is how fast another player completed a level.

I don’t really have any criticisms of the game. While I feel the base mechanics can become a little boring to play with, and the inclusion of power-ups or RNG mutations could really make the game appeal to me personally, that doesn’t feel like the kind of game KILL KNIGHT wants to be, and I can respect that. While it also steps outside of the game’s identity, I think a multiplayer co-op mode would be a pretty cool addition to the exciting, fast-paced violence the game already offers.