Killer Queen Black

Genre: Platformer / Arcade

Players: 1-8 Team Co-Op (Local, Local Wireless or Online)

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Review:

Killer Queen Black is a adaptation from arcades of an Arcade Team-Based Action-Platformer, Killer Queen, with a reputation for having an intense niche fan following and very hard-to-find arcade cabinets. The Switch version reduces the teams from five players to four (three drones and one queen), updates the art and adds in more weapon options, but at its core the concept is much the same.

It was honestly a bit tough to nail down the exact combination of genres to describe this game, because although it is definitely an action-focused platformer, and the one screen setup definitely reflects the game’s arcade-style gameplay, there are also elements of real-time strategy and even sports games here. This is largely due both to the team-based nature of the game, as well as the game’s goal structure.

There are three conditions that can be met to win a point in Killer Queen Black: “Economic”, “Military” and “Snail”. Players win if they can fill their hive’s slots with berries collected from the map, or if they can collectively manage to kill the enemy queen three times, or if they can manage to get their drones to ride a snail from the center of the map to a goal on their side.

It is this goal structure that is one of the most brilliant parts of this game, as each of these goals is a valid one, but focusing on one without being mindful of the others is a recipe for doom. It’s easy for drones to contribute to building the berry supply, but this can be time-consuming, and in the meanwhile it’s easy to lose to one of the other conditions. If players focus on taking out the enemy queen, victory can be had pretty quickly, but focusing on this as a group means neglecting the other goals while chasing the queen around. And the snail is a great way for a drone to claim victory, but moving it sloooowly along to its goal will leave that drone vulnerable to attack, so this often acts as a football of sorts that gets passed back and forth between teams until either one team manages to build a good defense or until teams turn their focus to other goals. If it helps, in the games I played, I’d wager that the victories tended to be about 60% military, 30% snail, and 10% economic, just to give a rough guess.

Before starting, players can decide if they prefer to be a drone, a queen, or either, and the game will decide based on this what role each player has. Queens have better attacks and mobility than drones tend to do, but the fact that killing them is a win condition also makes them a target, and the drones absolutely depend on powering up with “gates” that can be claimed by either queen exclusively for their team, making this a stressful position to play, as you’ll likely be seen as carrying your team to victory… or defeat.

Drones, on the other hand, don’t have the power or maneuverability of queens, but they have a greater variety of options open to them – they can power-up to one of multiple different forms using the aforementioned gates, and they are the only ones capable of bringing about two of the three win conditions. However, just how well they can go about those goals often depends on how good their queen is – a queen that doesn’t claim gates or charges in and gets herself repeatedly killed will tank a team in a way that even the best drones can’t help.

The game uses a nice pixel-based art style with some really freakish (but cool) post-apocalyptic background art depicting landscapes and what looks like cities that have been overrun by massive beehives. It’s definitely unique and works well for the game. The game also has a metal-inspired soundtrack that seems a bit at odds with the game’s somewhat cartoony bee characters, but it works well enough, I suppose.

As for how I felt about this game… I’m of two minds on it. On the one hand, when this game worked, it was absolutely brilliant, a unique and thrilling experience. However, at times it was infuriatingly frustrating, and I felt like my time with the game went back and forth between these two extremes.

Okay, first the good – if you luck into getting two decent teams, this can be an amazing test of skill and strategy. At any time, one of the goals can shift the way the game is being played. Maybe everyone is fighting over the snail, and you realize you can use this as an opportunity to start filling the hive with berries… or you decide to power up your drone to one of the varieties of fighting styles and hunt down the queen while she’s distracted. There’s plenty of variety here to keep things entertaining for a good long while.

On the other hand… the matchmaking here leaves something to be desired, and if you’re saddled with a bad team, or even just one bad player in the role of the queen, you’re doomed to play a terrible game. What’s worse, the only option for local play is for up to four players to use the same Switch to play online, with these players invariably being placed on the same team (and given the team-based nature of the game, this can be a huge advantage). And yeah, I noticed some lag online – it wasn’t in most matches, but it definitely happened, and at one point for some inexplicable reason the enemy’s queen seemed invincible (beyond the brief window queens get when they are attacking), which broke the game for that match.

Also, I cannot stress how disappointing it is that this game cannot be played locally on one console – you must either play online, or you need to grab a second Switch. What’s more, your options for matches, as well as the number of maps in the game, is highly limited.

Edit: The developer has released a new patch that improves the game by adding in local 8-player play with bots, a much-appreciated improvement. I can say that it works well, although it’s a bit of a pain shuffling bots into open slots. I didn’t feel this change warranted a Re-Review, but it was significant enough that it deserved mention here.

Finally, the controls themselves feel both a bit stiff and a bit unresponsive at times – it’s not enough to ruin the game, but it’s enough to make it more difficult to play than it should be.

Yeah, there’s a lot here that could have used some more work. Killer Queen Black is severely lacking in options, and some elements of the gameplay could have used just a bit of tweaking. However, if you’re patient enough to put up with this game’s issues, you’ll find it to be a unique and immensely rewarding multiplayer online experience, well worth playing.

tl;dr – Killer Queen Black is a team-based multiplayer Action-Platformer where eight players compete to see which team is the first to complete one of three goals. It’s amazing fun when it works, though there’s a terrible lack of options and occasional frustrations that make this a lesser game than it could have been.

Grade: B+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Multiplayer

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