Developer: Crooked Games Publisher: Crooked Games, Take It Studio! Steam Page: Death Kid
About The Game
Death Kid is a fast-paced arcade-inspired arena brawler with meta-progression. Wipe out hordes of daunting foes, master powerful abilities and grow stronger with each attempt. Venture deep inside a treacherous well to put the wheel of life and death back in motion and break the curse of immortality.
Introduction
The game starts out a bit like you would expect an Dark Souls game to start out. Images pan across the screen with some text but its all a little convoluted. We see there is a cult that used to live in a forest, a deep and never ending tunnel divided up by floors but wait there is a new adventurer and he wants to start the wheel of life and death again but what if the wheel of life and death does not want to be restarted. This is genuinely how the game starts, you have to love the convoluted stories within video games I for one think it makes for some really cool design work on the development part. you know there is a deeper story somewhere within this game but you have to go digging to find it.
Gameplay
Death Kid reminds me of binding of Isaac, however here we do not run around one floor the gameplay is more vertical by vertical I mean that your progress in a decent rather than moving to another room.
when you spawn in your character will put down 3 souls and its your job to defend these souls with your life now this might sound easy but trust me when I say this is difficult, the souls act as your life if you will, if all 3 souls get sucked up then you will die and go back to the start thus ending the current run that you are on.
The more enemies you kill during the run will level you up and this is what I found really addictive because when you die you don’t lose them levels, you use your new found skill point to unlock a new skills from the book. This gameplay mechanic along mean that you will forever get stronger the more you play and eventually things should get easier because of this.
Combat
The combat within Death Kid is quite simple however there are a few buttons to be pressing along the way, the more skills we unlock the more buttons that we will need to be pressing. The starting combo is pretty simple you just press shift to dash and you can use a mouse click three times to preform a combo of 3 punches if clicked again shortly after the 3 punches you can preform a special attack where you slam the ground.
Coupled with the basic combo you are able to fight while dashing the same combos apply here but instead of punches they come out as kicks instead. Death kid is also able to fire projectiles and regain mana by going super Saiyan (Evil Saiyan) Due to the red aura.
Now once you have played a bit and have the ability to level up you can unlock different moves like the spin kick, this is where you stop just spamming the mouse clicks and you press different buttons to preform different special moves which in my opinion spices the game up a little bit.
Our Thoughts
While we really enjoyed death kid we did feel like the combat was tailored to a controller more than a mouse and keyboard, this is due to sometimes it hard to see your reticule with so much going on. The dash does not always play ball with where you want to go either. This being said the game is still really fun and due to the levels remaining on your character.
