Kill Knight

Kill Knight takes the tried-and-true mechanics of an intense twin-stick shooter and seeks to complicate them with melee attacks and weapon reloading. The controls here are very difficult to get a handle on. It makes use of all four trigger buttons to shoot, reload, dash, fire your secondary weapon, and trigger your magic attack. On top of that you have a melee attack that is assigned to one of the face buttons. It took me hours to finally get comfortable with everything.

However, once I got going it really hooked me in. The fighting is the right level of difficulty where each death feels like you could have avoided it if you had just been paying better attention. There are also a number of challenges that keep replaying the levels interesting, and they eventually reward you with more powerful and intense weaponry.

It doesn’t quite rise to the brilliance of Robotron: 2084 or Geometry Wars but it comes close.