Kingdom of the Dead is a game that only understands two words. The first is the word BANG written in all capitals and the second is the drone of “brains!?” Released a few weeks ago, someone didn’t understand that majority of the games press was focused on a small title you might have heard of, Elden Ring. As a retro-style shooter, it takes clear influence from the Carmack and Romero project that you immediately thought of, though with a bit more influence from DOOM³ than I think anyone ever asked for in any shooter.

Taking influence is all well in good, but the question is, how much of that influence is halfway down someone’s throat and how much is actually being used as the template to build upon? For all my angry weekly diatribes about nostalgia in the Epic Games Store articles of late, I too can wear the rose-tinted specs as I drop to my knees and worship the PS2’s Spider-Man 2. However, it does none of us any good wittering on about how things were so much better in the past when we’re constantly trying to make things bigger, grander, better, and more accessible.

Retaining that carefree fun of skating about the selected level like a goth high on Pixy Stix, Kingdom of the Dead starts off with the building blocks firmly in place. Of course, you can up your mouse sensitivity and do all that you wish at the speed of light, but there is one thing Kingdom of the Dead refuses to give you, and that is some bloody light. This is probably the selling point of the entire game, the dark shadowy atmosphere dredging almost everything in a thick and moist layer of dithered horror. Though, it isn’t particularly scary.

Ultimately, it attempts to make you uneasy, in the likes of the mansion next to a graveyard that just happens to have the undead rising up with their guns and swords. It is like working with the supernatural in the South. You play as an agent for the eponymously named Bureau. Bureau of what? I don’t know, I assume the undead and the occult. There is a bit more of the modern furniture we’re used to in games. Given the art style, it is sometimes needed; Quest markers wouldn’t be a thing normally, but given the ability to view some actual distance is hindered slightly by the Obra Dinn-style dithering, it becomes tricky to parse the spots of black or very very dark grey.

One could argue exploration did that well enough back in the day, but I’m willing to stick my neck out a bit further. Secrets and exploration aren’t seemingly the principle. In fact, levels are relatively linear throughout, so one would have thought that would guide you well enough. The bright light of the mansion in the first level, for example, stands out and commands enough of you to head towards it like a masochist’s Mecca. However, the slow among us that think Call of Duty‘s former story campaigns aren’t intuitively laid out enough require quest markers holding their hands.

This isn’t to say that Kingdom of the Dead‘s design without them would be perfect either. In fact, I’ll kick that a little further down the stairs of the creepy church. Sound design is awful and directional audio isn’t going to help. Quite a few times I felt I was encircled by surround sound speakers, but only one would activate at a time. The leveling of audio also makes it impossible to parse how far away spooky Dave with his magic green eyes happens to be. Then there are the worm bosses, which make very little to no noise when moving despite being 30ft tall.

That sounds like a very small issue, but when you are playing an FPS and there is something big trying to attack you and lots of smaller enemies are grunting their own tune, this amounts to a more significant problem. What makes that more irritating is simply the fact the bosses can wipe away your health in a single hit, which is something I don’t mind in more refined games. I know that the rest of the industry and I are banging the From Software drum once again, but it is another example of audio design enhancing your spacial awareness. Understanding if you’ve just dodged an attack or if they are winding up once again helps.

Though comparably, the AI overall is relatively simple too. This makes me bring up the invited comparison, as you also fight an obvious iteration of Cacodemons and nothing particularly feels threatening. Meanwhile, you are given familiar tools to counter the almost harmless attacks: Yes you start with a pistol and move up to shotguns and miniguns, but you are also given a sword. I bet King Arthur would have loved a sword bestowed with the powers of Doom (2016)’s chainsaw, but it was not to be. Thus he died of the biggest enemy of the medieval ages, dysentery (or something). My point is that you will most likely regain any health taken away back with a single swish.

What Kingdom of the Dead learns from in the modern sense, the ability to regain health, checkpoints, or quest markers, is slightly undercut by a lack of modernization elsewhere. With the AI, you could do better running away from it than actively fighting. There is little point in action until the boss fights, and they aren’t significantly a test of skill either. This, alongside the sound design of the late 90s to early 00s, makes all the high speed or somewhat modern aspects fall back to earth like Icarus after attempting to clear out hellspawn from Mars or whatever that tale was about.

The question is, do I dislike it despite all its shortcomings? No. It has its heart in the right place, attempting to bring the air of 1993’s Doom into the modern age almost intact. While that is commendable, the fault comes when the ideas it does bring, end up creating more faults to mention. With a lack of brightness options, it can be a little infuriating to determine if the one pixel in the far side of a dark room is meant to be hidden furniture or something that’s about to shoot you.

In fact, the options altogether generate enough discussion on their own, as I think this is the first PC-centric FPS I’ve played in quite some time that doesn’t include a field-of-view slider. I could see that being the biggest issue, if it weren’t for a bug I’d have regularly where the window size would keep resetting, possibly due to having multiple monitors. Generally, any time I’d touch the options menu or sometimes simply press Esc, three of the four graphical settings would reset. Not that there are many to reset in the first place. Vsync, anti-aliasing, and resolution are your options alongside color, fullscreen toggle, button remapping, audio, and mouse settings. The latter five do not reset automatically.

Ultimately, Kingdom of the Dead is a little dead behind the eyes (and between the ears) but has good intentions on its goal. A bit of play-testing and refinement could have made it exemplary in the genre of classic-style shooters, which could have been helped by a couple of months in early access giving it leeway. However, with a full release come and gone amid a busy period for all, Kingdom of the Dead was lost in the Thriller-shuffle. It ended up like an OAP aerobics class full of pensioners hanging on to Zimmer frames with four left feet.

A PC copy of Kingdom of the Dead was provided by HOOK for the purposes of this review.

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Kingdom of the Dead

$14.99

6.5

Score

6.5/10

Pros

• Some modernization.
• Retro-style shooter.
• Fantastic art direction.

Cons

• Optimization is lacking.
• A lack of options.
• Sound design.
• Where is the F.O.V slider?