Desert Kill Preview for Steam Early Access

Do you miss 2006, and the charmingly simple days of sidescrolling, 2d murderfest simulators on sites like Miniclip? I know I do, and I know that Desert Kill intentionally or not tapped into those fond memories during my playthrough. Desert Kill  is a fast paced, top down, roguelike shooter from IO Games.

Desert Kill gives you a number of characters to choose from, each with a different aesthetic, backstory, weapon loadout, and statistics. They don’t tell you this at character select – I only realized this when I loaded in as the only available woman character – a skimpily clad Kill Bill reference – and saw that my health and armor bars were tiny, but my stamina – my stamina was huge. I could, and did, barrel roll through minigun fire before unloading point blank into chunks of pixelated assailants with an SMG, and it was delightfully entertaining. Dodging and ducking like a madman is something you’ll need to get used to in this game – it’s more a requirement than a tactical option, but zipping around the screen at light speed while rolling, shooting, then rolling again was simple but satisfying fun.

The missions in Desert Kill are fairly straightforward – get helicoptered to a map then kill two camps of enemies before you can unlock the boss encounter, which, everytime, I’ve played has been the same – but more on that later. The map is actually pleasant to look at, and it is clear that a fair amount of care was given to the environments – there were enough variations, pleasantly swaying trees, and bloodstains to make me appreciate the world I was shooting through. Enemy variety was diverse as well, with a good array of melee and ranged opponents, as well as the obligatory – and extremely satisfying to shoot – suicide bomber. Some enemies will drop coins on death, which you can take to a little mercenary’s store on the map to purchase health, ammo, upgrades, weapons, or even a vehicle to make your murder a bit more mobile. Getting hit by a vehicle is basically instant death – but that rule applies to you, so be be careful.

Once you’ve dispatched the enemies and secured your loot, it’s time to face the boss. I only faced off against one big bad when I unlocked the armored tank yard to fight – dun dun dun – a giant tank. There was a quickly discernible rhythm to the combat, with the boss fight split into three modes – the machine gun tracing fire across the field, then the main cannon firing, then the tank trying to run you over. Taking damage from either of the first two is annoying, but the third kills you outright if it so much as clips you. This happened to me more times than I am comfortable recounting. But! Killing the boss is satisfying, even if it remained the same each time I went back.

Desert Kill had more replayability than I thought it would – different upgrades and character loadouts kept me coming back to play multiple rounds. I had fun, and I didn’t think too much, but beyond unlocking additional characters, the game could really use some additional maps, enemy types, and bosses to keep things fresh.

Check Out the Desert Kill Steam Early Access Trailer:

Desert Kill is available for PC at $9.99 via Steam Early Access.