Watch On
Kill the Brickman, which publisher Poncle and developer Doonutsaur just shadow-dropped this afternoon, is one of those games that defies a simple, clean description. It’s a bit of a weirdo. But it’s a weirdo you can play right now for a meagre £4/$5, so it might be worth taking a punt on.
OK! So sentient bricks have invaded from space. They hunger for conquest and cash. The only way to put a stop to their nefarious schemes is by shooting them in their dumb faces with a revolver. A revolver, I should add, that you load with gurning, living bullets with special properties, like cloning themselves or corroding anything they hit.
It’s got classic arcade vibes, a roguelike structure, a hint of deckbuilding and a dose of bullet hell—except you’re the one responsible for the hell.
Oh, maybe it’s not too hard to explain after all. I’m so good at this.
As you earn cash from your murderous rampage, you’ll be able to arm yourself with new guns, new bullets, special clips that give you a bonus depending on the layout of your bullets and relics that bless you with new modifiers.
The problem is that there are a lot of bricks, and they’re surrounded by other bricks, which aren’t sentient, but which still cause wrinkles, ranging from basic bricks that simply block your bullets, to black hole bricks that spit your bullet out at another location.
But with the right combo of bullets, clips and relics, you can cover the screen in a barrage of gunfire, slaughtering these would-be conquerors before they can get their revenge.
Things can get just a little bit chaotic, especially since your bullets can be quite bouncy. The ricochet mechanic is your ally and adversary, letting you chain kills and reach bricks that aren’t in your line of sight; but your messy bouncing bullets might also hit things you’d rather avoid, like bricks that spawn even more bricks once they’re hit a certain number of times.
I took it for a quick spin myself before it shadow-dropped on Steam, and it’s definitely not one you dip into for a quick 20 minute giggle. It front-loads a lot of its complexity, giving you a fair amount to juggle right off the bat. But it’s weird and clever, and my brain is already spinning up, thinking about all the prospective strategies and builds I might be able to deploy to annihilate these pesky cosmic bricks.
There’s just one thing I’m worried about: I think we might be the baddies. We’re told the bricks are invading, but I’ve only ever seen them just chilling in space, and they only ever attack once I’ve already started shooting at them—at which point they start sweating and crying.
Let’s not forget about the bullets, either. They all have faces twisted in agony. I cram these sentient tools of destruction into my gun, launch them into space, and watch them die, while they kill weeping bricks. Wow, I’m a monster.
Regardless, killing bricks is, it turns out, a lot of fun. And it costs less than my lunch. So I’ll put ethics aside just this once.
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