Keeping Up With The Latest Trends

Trends in gaming happen pretty frequently, with developers jumping on bandwagons to catch the trend in time. And we seem to be stuck right between two at the moment. 

In one corner, we have Vampire Survivors and all the subsequent releases riffing on the bullet heaven. And in the other is Balatro, with developers making roguelikes out of anything they can. Interestingly, these two indie juggernauts have just collaborated in the new Ante Chamber level for Vampire Survivors.

Kill the Brickman falls under the shadow of Balatro, adding roguelike elements to a traditional brick-breaker. It’s published by poncle, who developed and published Vampire Survivors. Hopefully that then explains the intro to this article.

A Face You Just Want To Punch

If the title of the game wasn’t obvious enough, the bricks have become brickmen and you need to kill them. But rather than be brick shaped, they have become square and gained these smug like faces. These faces do help though; the smugness makes it all that easier to shoot them in.

In the main mode you are given a gun with one basic barrel and some basic bullets. You will face-off against basic brickmen and have a basic objective to complete. Guns will level up in between runs but in true roguelike fashion, everything else is a one and done.

There are a variety of brickmen to defeat, each one coming with their own methods for disrupting you. Some will spawn trap bricks that will gobble up unfortunate bullets that hit them, and others can recover health if not targeted in the previous turn. Every so often you will encounter boss bricks that often take the shape of four or five bricks together to give them a more menacing appearance. You can highlight them using the left trigger to find out what each of them do. However, brute force, whittling their health down means that many times they will not be able to action their abilities between turns due to them already being defeated. 

An Automatic Would Be Useful Here

You don’t have a paddle to move around the bottom of the screen like a standard brick-breaker. Instead, you shoot from your chosen gun and watch the bullets fly around the screen. Kill the Brickman is a much slower affair too, sometimes requiring precision shots off a brick’s corner to effectively maximise output. Sometimes this slower gameplay is to its detriment though, as individual runs can feel tiresome when the only real change between levels is bricks with much more HP than the previous level.

There are three types of bullets: A red explode bullet, a green corrode bullet and a blue clone bullet. Their abilities should be pretty self-explanatory, but bullets with additional modifiers can be purchased in between levels from the shop, along with new clips and relics. These work like Jokers in Balatro, and similarly the game will recommend selling those that become redundant.

At least, in theory. Kill the Brickman feels like a daunting prospect in the first couple of goes, but there really isn’t too much going on between the ears of it once you boil down the components. Certain bullets can be levelled up individually, and these can be paired up with clips and relics that boost their attack power and bounce (the number of times a bullet can hit a brick or a wall before disappearing). And once you line up a shot to bounce repeatedly between bricks, you can cause devastating damage to bricks that will see you through every level.

Controlling That Recoil

However, lining up a shot with a controller, or even moving around the menus, is far too complicated. Kill the Brickman supports Xbox Play Anywhere and works far better with a mouse. To line a shot up, your best bet is to get the cursor in the vicinity of where you want to fire, before fine tuning it using the shoulder buttons. If this fine tuning could work a bit faster as well, that would be great.

Menus, and in particular the shop menu, are just terrible. They feel very unintuitive, with the analog sticks and directional buttons being used to navigate in entirely different ways. It takes a bit of time to get used to, but even when in the heat of the moment you will revert back to a more traditional way of thinking these inputs work and find yourself momentarily lost.

Away from the main game are some puzzle-like levels where you need to clear the board given a finite amount of money, but as many turns as required. These shorter, and snappier versions of the main levels can sometimes require a bit more thinking, especially when it comes to the placement of items, but follow the same basic principle.

An Inventive Idea

Kill the Brickman’s attempt to add a roguelike to a brick-breaker is an inventive idea, but not the best execution of it. It lacks the complexity of a properly good roguelike and is hampered by some poor controls and shallow gameplay. There is fun to be had, but only in small doses.

Important Link

Poncle Just Dropped a NEW Game! Kill the Brickman is a Surprise Addiction – https://www.thexboxhub.com/poncle-just-dropped-a-new-game-kill-the-brickman-is-a-surprise-addiction/

Buy Kill the Brickman on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/kill-the-brickman/9p5jz9krvhwc