An outrageously bombastic slaughter-fest with a uniquely demonic presentation—KILL KNIGHT is the latest from Melbourne’s own PlaySide Studios, known for titles like Age of Darkness: Final Stand and Dumb Ways to Die 3. The game is a fast-paced isometric shooter where an onslaught of enemies will take over an evolving arena and it’s your job to fill them with enough bullets and puncture wounds to bring them down before they bring you down. With its grim-yet-appealing visual style and challenging-yet-rewarding gameplay loop, KILL KNIGHT quickly solidifies itself as an engaging romp through eternal sufferance.

This over-the-top shooter is a glorious depiction of violent catharsis. The visual and sound design do a superb job of emphasising that feeling of dread and carnage as you battle through layers of hellscape, perilously trying to reach an end. It’s a twin-stick shooter at its core, with the player character being controlled from an isometric perspective as critters and demons swarm the battlefield. Thankfully, a range of tools are at your disposal including a dash to escape danger, guns to annihilate foes at a range, and a sword to carve through those that get too close. The systems all work beautifully together and it makes for a deceptively elegant gameplay loop that feels like a choreographed dance of blood, blade and bullets when you’re performing at your best.

KILL KNIGHT has many mechanics that work lovingly together. A secondary and more powerful gun can be used to take down enemies with ease, though this weapon has limited ammunition, unlike your main hand. Bullets can be recovered by getting melee kills and there’s a particularly satisfying and devastating melee strike that can be performed with perfect timing during a reload. Another quick-reload option allows you to instantly suck in all blood orbs around you, a resource that’s dropped by your foes and is used to charge up a big attack. This attack drops health shards that are crucial for your survival in these ruthless arenas.

The game features an attack that can be charged up via melee kills, you can parry certain melee attacks with perfect timing, and you can even enter a slow-mo realm for a brief period after the aforementioned parry. There are a lot of systems in place here but they all work magnificently together. At first, it was a little overwhelming and left me craving something more simple and satisfying. However, after revisiting the very helpful tutorial screen again and paying closer attention, it all started to click, and now I can’t conceive of a more simplified KILL KNIGHT.

The upgrade path for your weapons and tools helps you tailor your loadout to your gameplay style. Different guns, blades, armour and more can be unlocked and equipped, each providing new advantages and disadvantages. Certain equipment will pair nicely together and each piece of equipment has its own associated ‘challenge’ for you to complete to unlock further gear. Perhaps this upgrade path feels a little slow overall, but it’s also the game’s way of teaching the player patience. This isn’t an experience you can rush through to complete. It will take a lot of trial and error, a lot of failure, a lot of ‘one more go’ mantras, and a lot of pushing your limits to see what you can achieve. A cosy game KILL KINIGHT is not.

Five stages may not sound like a lot, but I can promise there is a good amount of content here. Could the game have done a better job of changing up the visuals of each stage to make it feel like a more monumental progression from one area to the next? Potentially. Though the visual identity of this game is so strong it may have been to its detriment anyway. If it could have found a different way to make progress feel more rewarding and impactful then KILL KNIGHT would be a nearly flawless release. As it stands, it’s a highly rewarding if not slightly repetitive shooter filled to the brim with promise, polish, and the excellent execution of both ideas and foes.