Double Kick Heroes shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does. It’s a side-scrolling shooter pitting the last heavy metal band on earth against hordes of zombies, demons, and other end-of-days menaces. The story campaign is only a few hours long, and the player’s vehicle is basically on rails for most levels, but by adding in a mixture of Rock Band style rhythm mechanics and user-created track options, Double Kick Heroes becomes a game unlike anything else out there.
What do you do when a massive group of evil zombies is chasing your car down the highway? If you’re the band in Double Kick Heroes, you strap some rear-facing guns to your custom Gundillac, rig the weapons to fire every time your drummer hits a beat, and then drive like your life depends on it. Higher difficulty levels add other weapons, such as grenades, which are tossed into the pursuers by other members of the band. Unapologetically foul-mouthed, and featuring nothing but pounding heavy metal songs, Double Kick Heroes offers an unforgiving rhythm challenge for anyone willing to take it on.
The game features five different play modes: Story, Arcade, Hellgate, Fury Road, and User Levels. Story, obviously, covers the game’s main story as the band tries to fix, or at least end, the apocalypse. Arcade allows players to experience individual levels from the story campaign without any of that pesky plot. Hellgate uses the same game mechanics but has players going through levels created from the music of various guest bands which contributed music to the game. Fury Road provides an infinite gauntlet mode with both a global leaderboard and a daily challenge. Finally, User Levels allows players to download tracks created by other users for all sorts of music, assuming the player already has a copy of the song in question, or else is willing to acquire it.
Double Kick Heroes features retro 16-bit style graphics. Unlike some retro style games which still end up being very CPU- and GPU-intense, Double Kick Heroes runs fine on older PCs. The difficulty curve is similarly old school. The game has five difficulty settings: Rock, Hard Rock, Metal, Violence, and Extreme. All but the easiest mode requires managing multiple tracks, which this reviewer found especially difficult to do with a controller.
Whale, the band is in trouble this time. It’s going to take some serious skills to be baleen them out of this one.
A word on controllers – Double Kick Heroes supports gameplay with a keyboard, gamepad, arcade fighting sticks, and drum kits. Players wanting to use a drum kit should definitely check whether their kit is supported by the game, however, as not all USB kits which work with Rock Band will work with this game. Controller and keyboard buttons can all be remapped to the user’s preference.
A rhythm game lives and dies by its soundtrack. Double Kick Heroes features a huge number of new heavy metal songs, predominantly composed by prolific video game composer Elmobo. Folks who hear no difference between a freight train doing 70mph and a heavy metal song may not get a lot of enjoyment out of this game, because it’s one loud drum and guitar number after another. Perhaps the game is best taken in shorter play sessions, where the tunes don’t start to feel monotonous after a while. A few notable songs do depart from the basic formula, however, allowing the game to branch out into other metal subgenres. The BABYMETAL styled “Don’t Bite My Butt” track is a particular standout.
Gamers can expect 2-5 hours to get through the main campaign, depending on the chosen difficulty level. Beyond that, the game’s staying power is largely in the hands of how much a player really loves heavy metal music, and is interested in completing higher difficulty levels. There seems to be a small but dedicated community on Steam creating new user levels at the time of this review.
Double Kick Heroes really aims for a very specific niche of the rhythm game market. For players who love heavy metal and retro difficulty settings, this is a great opportunity to rock out to some new tracks and a fun story, then maybe create some zombie-slaying mayhem of their own to their favorite Ozzy or Motörhead track. Gamers who prefer other music genres may find the experience a bit repetitive and less enjoyable.
A Steam code for this game was provided for review. Double Kick Heroes is out now for Microsoft Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PCs via Steam.
