KILLER QUEEN BLACK Review for Nintendo Switch

Killer Queen Black is a competitive multiplayer game from Liquid Bit and BumbleBear Games. In it, you play as a humanoid bee in a team of 4 against another team of 4 humanoid bees.

There are 3 ways to secure a victory: military, economic, and snail. Military victory is achieved if the other team’s queen is killed 3 times. Economic victory is when 1 team fills their hive with berries collected on the field. Snail victory is when a worker on 1 team rides the giant snail to the other team’s side of the field; why this is a victory condition is beyond me. A thing to keep in mind is that all 3 of these victory conditions are active in every match. Unless you keep an eye on the entire map, a team can sneak a victory past you without you knowing until it is too late to stop them.

Each team consists of 1 queen and 3 workers. The workers can gather berries, use berries to power-up or become a soldier with a weapon, or ride/delay the snail. The queen always has a weapon to fight with, but unlike the workers, she can’t collect berries or ride the snail.

There are grey hexagons, known as gates, scattered about the field. While gates start grey (neutral), a queen can convert the gate to their team’s color, making it only usable by that queen’s workers. A worker can use a gate to either gain 1 of 2 power-ups or to convert into a soldier. Like the queen, soldiers are unable to gather berries or ride the snail, so it’s usually a good idea to leave at least 1 player on the team as a worker. Each gate only has 2 options to choose from, so most maps don’t include all the power-ups or soldier classes.

The queen and soldiers all carry a weapon of some sort. These weapons can kill any enemy player in one hit, including the queen, although you can block a weapon strike by attacking with a weapon of your own before the enemy hits you. The queen always has a sword and is more powerful with it than a sword-wielding soldier.

The soldiers can have 1 of 3 weapons: a sword, a flail, or a blaster. The sword soldier can charge forward, but can’t charge as far as the queen and lacks her ability to charge downwards. The flail soldier spins the flail around their body vertically, which since this is a 2D game, this means it follows the soldier in a circle. The blaster soldier can shoot horizontally and the blast will continue moving forward until it hits a wall. To balance the blaster soldier with the other 2, the blaster has a 5 second cool-down. The queen and all 3 soldiers are also capable of flying. While the queen always spawns with a sword, soldiers revert back to workers when killed. Workers can become soldiers by taking a berry to a gate owned by their team.

There are 3 options for online multiplayer: quick match, ranked match, and custom match. A quick match requires at least 2 players to participate, 1 for each team, any empty slots are filled by computer-controlled opponents.  A ranked match requires all 8 slots to be controlled by players. A custom match can be played either alone with computer-controlled characters, or with up to 7 other players.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game. As such, I think a fair rating for it is 8.5/10.

Check Out the Killer Queen Black Trailer: