• Killer is Dead
  

  5 hours playtime

  15 of 48 achievements

This is a hack ‘n’ slash. The X button attacks (successful hits fill your special meter), the B button is for blocking (hold while still) or dodging (push while holding a direction), the left trigger goes into “aim gun” mode, and the right trigger is for firing your gun (rapid fire but uses your special meter, slows down if meter is out). The Y button does…something? I think it’s for guard-breaking, but I don’t know; it doesn’t seem to work, and you never really need to use it since you can just “dodge” around the enemy and attack their back whenever they block. I don’t remember if the A button does anything or not. Lastly, if you dodge right when an attack is about to hit you (when it flashes red), you’ll enter into “attack-a-bunch-really-quickly” mode where enemies slow down for a couple seconds and you lock on to the enemy that just tried to attack you.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the game is fairly slow to start. The entire “first mission” is just movement and camera tutorials, with the second (and even some of the third) mission being attack and dodging tutorials. In contrast, the boss of the fourth mission is easily the hardest in the game, as it can teleport right by you and explode even if you dodge (and you also haven’t had much of a chance to get many upgrades at this point). It took a while for me to realize the game expects players to be able to use dodging and blocking strategically, but the game doesn’t do a good job at communicating which attacks correspond to which maneuver; sometimes, you’ll dodge at the last instant only for the boss to adjust its trajectory and hit you anyway, and sometimes, you’ll hold the block button in time but be knocked down anyway. The best I could gather is that, for dodge-able attacks, the enemy will flash red right before attacking, but sometimes a dodge-able attack won’t have the flash (or maybe it does but it’s barely perceptible; the flash is fairly faint as it is, with the darker parts of enemies not changing color).

Despite that little quirk, the game is really easy (at least, on Normal mode). There’s only a few different enemy types and, as per usual for hack ‘n’ slash games, no real level design besides “hall” and “room”. The most common enemies don’t even block your attacks; you can just stun-lock them to death by tapping the attack button. The shield enemies might seem annoying at first, but then you’ll realize you can just walk around them and do the same thing (same goes for enemies that block your attacks after a bit). There are also large enemies, but aside from one type that could do a Sonic the Hedgehog spin-dash, they’re effectively just normal enemies with longer range and a bit more health. The real variety comes with ranged enemies: there are teleporting eyeballs that shoot lasers and normal enemies (that usually appear on out-of-reach platforms) holding laser-sight machine guns.The challenge comes in when the game mixes melee and ranged enemies together, and you have to deal with one while keeping an eye out for the others’ attacks, though there are usually places to take cover from the ranged enemies in those instances. The laser sight lets you know when the machine gun enemies are about to attack, but the eyes don’t have that warning, and can be rather annoying because of it (imagine fighting an enemy, then a laser comes in from off screen and hits you before you can react). It’s at those times I think the game could benefit from a proper lock-on system like in Metroid Prime, or at least an enemy radar like in…I dunno, maybe Metroid Prime.

Actually, there is a third ranged enemy: drones, and these are super annoying because they can spawn/fly in places that you won’t think to look (or are simply hard to aim your gun at), and they stun you when they shoot you (which means you gotta shake the control stick back and forth before you can move again). They also don’t have any warning before shooting, like the eyes. Luckily, they don’t show up that often.

But yeah, the individual stages themselves don’t have much variety between them (in fact, the dream lake stages are dips in difficulty, either having no enemies or just a few of the weak ones). Like Nier: Gestalt, the main variety is with the bosses. They have a decent variety with their attacks without making it obtuse as to what you have to do to win. The train boss (at least, it’s second phase) had a really good way to balance both your melee attacks and your ranged ones: if you get too close, it’ll do sweeping melee attacks, and if you back away, it’ll use a spread shot. I’d say it’s more fitting as the final boss than the actual final boss: not only is the final boss’s first phase just a rehash of the fourth mission’s boss, but all three of its phases basically boil down to “run at you and attack” with no ranged attack, and the attacks are fast enough that if you dodge successfully at all, it will trigger your “attack-a-bunch-really-quickly” mode, and the boss will teleport and try to attack again right at the end, giving you just enough time to dodge again, which repeats the process and ends the fight pretty quickly.

Overall, this game is okay. Like other hack ‘n’ slash games, there isn’t a lot of variety or challenge, but if you’re a fan of the genre, it may be worth picking up on sale; just don’t play it all at once.