If you were to hold a talking sword to my neck and force me to describe it, KINGDOM of the DEAD, in my mind at least has qualities of both Doom and Left for Dead, and that my friend is no bad thing.Īs you WASD your way around the maps, heading up or down levels, or in the case of The Crypt, down and further down, you will be powering along nicely for a few seconds before you will notice a disturbance in the earth ahead followed by an onslaught of the undead. Okay, I’ve managed to get so far into this review without giving away what kind of game you will be playing so let’s head that way next. This will drop you off at the entrance of wherever you have headed to, The Mill, The Mansion, or The Crypt for example and from then on, that’s where things start to get a bit creepy. You can skip through this preamble with a click of a mouse button, and will do once you have seen it and are revisiting a level. We aren’t going to go into great detail because we don’t want to spoil things, but suffice to say, your sword is quite a talkative chap when he gets going. This then sets you on your journey, which is taken on horseback while some chit-chat between you and the sword goes on setting the scene a little and revealing more of the story. I spent a little time looking for a door but it turns out all you have to do is approach your desk from the correct side to be presented with the levels available to you.įrom there you can read the brief descriptions and decide which you want to head off to first. The game starts off in your cabin, which you can return to at any time you quit a level and from there it took me a minute or so to work out what to do. We would suggest starting with the expectations of your skill low as that worm can be a pain to beat and you will still get a heap of satisfaction when you finally beat a level. But more about that later.Īcross the game’s eight locations – of which only three are unlocked at the start of a game, you will face increasingly tough missions to defeat Death – who tends to manifest himself as a giant worm creature that instantly kills you with a single blow, at least until the end when you will set eyes on the skeletal psychopath yourself.Įach location has three independent difficulty levels and each level has extra objectives on top of the previous level as well as tougher enemies. GATEKEEPER’s main purpose is to defeat Death and his armies – a pretty broad-ranging remit but that’s the task at hand. The settings are quite gothic in nature and you are assuming the role of Agent Chamberlain, a professor turned Army General (non-standard career path, I grant you) and you are now working for the secret government program known as GATEKEEPER – and known by me, as something else with too many capital letters. For starters, here we are set back in 19th century East Coast America. Okay, so there’s a bit of story to get through considering you could just run around blowing zombie heads off. So I booted up our review copy, aware that the devs had pushed back the release date at the last minute to give it some extra polish, and readied my WASD keys for a wander around a game we have seen a million times before.įour hours later I looked at the clock and then took a double-take, wow that went quickly, and I’ve just had an awful lot of fun. And no, the grammar ninja that lives in my brain does not appreciate the overuse of capital letters in the game’s title either. I don’t massively go for horror FPS titles as my jam, nor do I gravitate to games with a ‘hand-drawn (TM)’ aesthetic particularly. I went into Kingdom of the Dead blind really. If you watch a YouTube video of KotD or even look at the screenshots, part of you inside may cry out “not another indie-art project with a game attached”, and in some ways, that’s fair, because there are a lot of them. I like it when a developer takes an idea and literally smothers it in old-school gameplay. There is a lot about Kingdom of the Dead that is right up my alley. Let’s get this out of the way in the first line.
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