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.
Kill KnightDeveloper: PlaySidePublisher: PlaySidePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Released 2nd October on PC (Steam), Xbox Series S/X, PS4/5, Switch
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!
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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.