Kill Knight delivers violent thrills and cathartic kills | Hands-on preview

Kill Knight’s title is about as on the nose as you can get. It’s a game where you are a knight, and you are required to kill. But like, a lot. Blasting your way through “Super Hell” is as cathartic as you’d expect, even if it is bastard hard. Quite why you’ve been given so many weapons to serve out your sentence in hell is a matter best understood by the creators of Kill Knight, but I suppose it would be quite boring if all you did was stand around getting murdered over and over. This way you’re getting murdered while committing murder to a very loud soundtrack.

The gameplay loop in Kill Knight can only be described as “aggressive”. Your moveset is tutorialised up the wazoo when you first start, and at first it seems a lot to remember. Mr. Knight (first name: Kill, presumably) has twin pistols, a shotgun, and a very sharp sword. Action takes place in a series of grid like platforms, keeping you confined to a tight space and hurling enemies at you like it’s a Survivor game.

Not only must you keep moving to avoid getting pinned in corners like a boyband member trying to make it across a school playground, you must also be aware of a growing number of abilities that work in tandem with your active reloads. So first there’s standard active reloads which make your bullets hit harder, but you can also use melee attack when the slider is in the sweet spot to generate more energy for your big blast, and then you can parry during the active reload, which sucks in all the red orbs you’ve hacked out of enemies to level up your stats, which gives you a much-needed heal. You’ve also got a shotgun, which you refill with melee kills.

While this seems like you have a lot on your side, it’s incredibly tough to keep up with when the hordes of hell (sorry, super hell) are bearing down on you with a list of burning questions that can only be properly answered with extreme violence. You get very, very few moments to breathe and when you do, they last mere heartbeats. And bear in mind also that elites and bosses have shields that must be blasted off with your special attack, necessitating multiple hits and a good deal of kiting.

Both addictive and punishing, Kill Knight is the kind of game you put on when you need to work out some internal frustrations. It wastes no time on story or context, and although there seems to be progression and weapons to unlock or upgrade, these elements aren’t in the preview, so it’s hard to gauge how rewarding – or not – these unlocks will be. It certainly needs something to pull you on besides the simple act of killing hordes of demons over and over. The “accomplishment” of clearing a stage is over so quickly that you’ll barely register a victory before you’re sliding around on hellspawn guts again.

There’s a wonderful rhythm to it all though that almost makes it feel like an isometric Doom. Empty your pistols, tactically choose which type of reload you need, crack out the shotgun in a pinch, then switch to melee for a few beats to claw back a little ammo – oh, your massive super attack is ready, so do you use it to clear a path through the wall of teeth or save it in case another big armoured bastard spawns on top of you? It’s this minute-to-minute pressure that elevates Kill Knight above a plain old Roguelike shooter, and it’s what makes it feel so moreish.

With a full release due in October, we’ll get to see how deep Kill Knight actually is. For now, it’s about as deep as it needs to be, with a surprising tactical breadth and some truly satisfying violence heaped on top.

Kill Knight is scheduled for release on PC, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox on October 3, 2024.