Kill to Collect - PC Review - by Selthor ⋆ Moé Reviews

Kill to Collect – PC Review – by Selthor of We Touch Games
Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie
Developer: Pieces Interactive Publisher: Pieces Interactive
Release Date: Apr 6, 2016

Kill to Collect is a fairly new game from Pieces Interactive, the same studio that brought us Magika 2 and Leviathan: Warships. The game is a top down cyberpunk rogue-lite in which you can play as one of four different bounty hunters, and go on bounty runs with as many as three friends.

The bounty runs are basic, procedurally generated room-based dungeons, with 4 types of rooms. The first of which is a starting room where your characters spawn on each floor. The most common type of room is a basic room with enemies, with typically three to four enemies spawning in the room per player in the group, and more reinforcements spawning as you kill enemies. Every floor has at least one boss room, which usually contains 4-6 enemies per player, with more waves of reinforcements, but also a treasure chest reward and food stamps for clearing it. These chests contain randomized loot drops with at least one med-pack per character, and then random boosts and weapons (more on these later). The last room ends the floor, awards you food stamps, and contains 4 power-ups/weapons to buy for credits which drop from enemies that you kill, a food dispenser which allows you to trade your food stamps for randomized food buffs that last for the remainder of the bounty run, and a med station which allows you to restore your health for credits. Once you reach the final floor, there is only one boss room that, depending on where you are in the story, will either have a large group of tougher mobs, or a boss character with randomized bonuses and mobs to fight beside it.

As far as the options go they are divided up into visual, sound, input, general and game play, all with sliders to modify them. There are no drop down menus at all, which is a bit annoying. The game comes with most of the basic video options, as seen below. Even though 1600 by 900 is the highest resolution offered, you don’t really need any more than that with this game. Audio has three options; master volume, music volume, and sound effect volume. Input allows you to choose from gamepad or keyboard and mouse, and change the presets as you desire. General allows you to choose a title or language, and to reset the hints from the game. Game play gives you a variety of options for names and healthbars, gore, and camera shake.

Now that you have a basic idea of the layout of the game, I will talk a bit more about the options the game presents you with. In either single player or a group, you have 4 different game modes to chose from. As in most games, you have a story mode which contains brief snippets of humorous dialogue between bounty runs. You have two challenge modes in which you take on a four floor dungeon either posting a score for a one shot attempt, or a mode where you can try as many times as you want to post your best possible score. The game does have a leaderboard for each mode and each various party size. The last mode is called Warzone, and it is a game mode where the normal rules do not apply, and everything is randomized.

As you play, you are not restricted to playing a certain character. You can switch between the four bounty hunters between runs, without resetting your storyline progress. Each hero has four unique abilities of their own, and then one open slot for a weapon. Kate Katana is a sword wielding hero who has a basic sword slash, a line attack that knocks enemies down, a rolling dodge, and then an ultimate ability that does a quick area of effect burst that knocks enemies back. Ivon Ironfist is a fist fighting character that has a basic jab, a forward burst attack that causes an enemy to take double damage the next time it is hit, a short teleport to dodge attacks, and an ultimate that causes enemies that get close to him to take damage for a short duration. Riot Ray is a heavily armored character with a shotgun that has a basic conical shotgun attack with a short range that does more damage to enemies the closer they are to you, a jump to dodge forward, and an ultimate that has him rush around, plowing through enemies and knocking them back doing damage to all enemies he hits. Shocking Shelly has a basic staff attack that hits all enemies in a line, a conical electric discharge that damages all enemies it hits, a jet pack dash to dodge, and an ultimate that drops a small turret that will fire at enemies doing small amounts of damage and very briefly stuns any enemy it hits. The characters abilities share common traits in that their basic attack has no cooldown, the special attacks have a roughly one second cooldown, their dodges have two charges with a ten second cooldown per charge, and their ultimates take time to charge before they can be used and between each use.

The other slot each character has for actions is a weapon slot. Weapons can come from loadouts you unlock, drop from enemies that use a weapon, come in chests, or be purchased from the end of floor room. There is a pretty good variety of weapons, I personally encountered a whip, a pistol (single shot), a flamethrower, a plasma pistol (burst of 3 shots), various grenades and a grappling gun that damages enemies and pulls them towards you. There are also a variety of consumables you can pick up along the way as well, either from chests, or purchased in the end floor section. These range from medpacks to proximity mines, to a berserker buff that causes you and your allies to move faster and hit harder.

The enemies you will face are randomized as are the dungeon layouts, so no two playthroughs are the same. You start out with simple enemies such as little gun bots and enemies with axes, and as you progress you end up fighting enemies that have shields, gun bots that fire a spread of 3 projectiles, enemies that heal, etc. The bosses on the final floor are also randomized and are given random buffs, from fast projectiles to extra health, or even damage reflection.

The game has an 80’s retro soundtrack to it and plays very well. The controls are very tight in single player, though it does suffer from lag issues in multiplayer, which is unfortunate. The multiplayer can be very fun, but the experience suffers greatly from overcrowding of enemies, friendly fire from items like grenades, and overall lag within the game, possibly due to the overcrowding of the game.

There are 3 setting for difficulty; Easy, Normal, and Hard. The only difference I noticed was your starting health decreases by 2 bars the higher you go in difficulty. I started at Normal and found that after two or three bounty runs I needed to actually drop it down to Easy. The game is very difficult. I accepted that and enjoyed that you were rewarded with currency towards unlocks no matter if you fail the bounty or not. You can unlock loadouts to start the game with, skins, and titles by collecting this currency just from playing the game. You can not pick and choose what you unlock, it unlocks things as you build up currency, the first skins being at 10000 currency. You get more currency both for completing bounties and for higher difficulty, the reward amounts increase as you progress through the game.

I enjoyed the game when I started, but as I progressed, the randomness of the game began to wear on me. When you fight your way through a dungeon only to end things going into a boss with a nice food build (those are also randomized) full health, a good weapon, medpacks and other great buff items only to face a boss with extra health and damage reflection that basically kills you because you can not sustain through the damage reflection long enough to kill it, and having to start over again hoping for a better combination of enemy buffs, it gets frustrating.

The game is currently available on Steam for the price of $19.99, which, to be honest, I feel is a little steep. It is not a bad game and can be fun if you enjoy the type, but I would recommend waiting for the game on a Steam sale, and then maybe get a few copies for you and friends to play together. Overall I give the game a six out of ten single player, and despite the drawbacks to multiplayer I listed a seven out of ten for multiplayer.