Double Kick Heroes (Xbox One)

Double Kick Heroes is a rhythm game packed to bursting with love for metal music and its culture, and wrapping all of that up in a zombie apocalypse where the intense music and devil may care attitude of the genre get to thrive makes it seem like the game would be a match made in Hell or Valhalla or whatever afterlife one might deem the most genre appropriate. It certainly pays a lot of attention to its cultural inspirations and puts a lot of work into its sprite work and the design of the enemies you’ll be blasting with your music powered Gundillac, but the game balance doesn’t really seem at the point where you can actually enjoy all the awesome sights while still keeping up with the music.

 

Double Kick Heroes has the player playing the drums, an act that already isn’t as clean as you might hope on an Xbox controller. Mashing the A or B button rapidly to try and match the incredibly fast notes you need to hit as the drummer isn’t easy to do while holding your controller in the way necessary to also hit the notes for your grenade launcher and sniper rifle once they enter the fray. The game never tells you about the best trick to hitting some demanding rapid fire back-to-back notes is to press A and B at the same time repeatedly and not get too beat up that you’re not getting perfects on each note, so once you do start to understand that expectation things do become a bit more manageable. If the grenade launcher or sniper rifle is available in a level though you’ll need to also make time to press the assigned buttons for their own different rhythm track, but they are at least optional and you can build up power for them when necessary rather than trying to hit every note in the song.

 

The main reason you don’t really need to play perfectly is how hitting the notes actually impacts gameplay. As the Gundillac drives forward in a stage, zombies and other enemy types will be running behind the vehicle trying to kill you. If they successfully reach it they’ll deal damage, so you need to fire the two rear guns. You can hit your drum notes with either A or B, that determining which gun will fire, and so long as there aren’t enemies to keep at bay it won’t matter too much if you miss notes. However, the more notes you hit, even if it’s not perfectly, the more your gun can upgrade, starting with simple pistols and soon becoming shotguns and cannons that deal more damage and can cover more lanes of traffic. The idea is you’re meant to pick which button to press during the drum playing to fire on enemies as they approach, but the music for the drums eventually starts to demand so much of your attention you can only really get a basic idea of which gun you’ll want to be firing. Since the weapons will downgrade if you miss notes though, you’re incentivized to always be at least trying to hit them in case tougher or more numerous enemies require that kind of firepower. Some forgiveness is mildly present since so many notes come your way that you can build your weapons back up but you might still find yourself weaker than you want to be if you get sloppy.

Up above the tracks with the incoming notes is your metal band in their car realized with some solid spritework, and the enemies chasing after them are fairly imaginative and packed with fun details… if you actually really got a chance to look at them. Keeping up with the music will mean you can sneak glances at them at best or might not even really get to see them until the level is over and you can quickly peek at what was behind you the whole time. While the game starts off with the undead as its main enemy type, you’ll encounter evil chickens, Klansmen, mythical creatures, demons, dinosaurs, a man with a shark head and a Mad Max style car, demon sheep, the military, and who knows how many things you’ll never get a good look at it because you’re busy on the drums. If you do set the difficulty to its lowest Rock setting to better divide your attention though, an unusual inverse problem happens where you can kill the opposition so quickly you rarely get a good look at them still. Double Kick Heroes isn’t the first rhythm game that doesn’t understand you can’t really have a visual treat if the player needs to watch the incoming notes separately, and it feels like, if anything holds the game back, it’s that idea that you’re missing out by actually playing the game since you’re being denied the chance to watch the awesome battle in the street.

 

While I opened with the harshest criticism and the one I feel most colors a player’s experience, there is still a lot to like in Double Kick Heroes. The main five characters are a rebellious band of friends who find their big concert has been attended by a pack of zombies instead of metalheads. Heading out into the wasteland with nothing but their car and instruments, they focus first on survival but soon get pulled into trying to help others and get to the bottom of a apocalypse that goes much deeper than the resurrection of the undead. They’ll actually come into contact with various legally safe analogues to famous figures in the metal community or pop culture in general like characters clearly based on Marilyn Manson, Danny Trejo, and Tenacious D. Despite the serious situation the main five characters all bring a good level of humor and energy to the affair. They’ll often speak in references to media or even just sing a statement, the game even beginning with an actual song that has them speak to each other through the lyrics, but the silly interactions between them make them feel like a real group of aloof young adults.

 

Some of them like the lead guitarist Jack unfortunately perhaps lean too often into always singing dialogue to the point you barely get to know them, but the group’s leader Lincoln is a more serious and grounded lady to keep the group on topic, Snake is the new guy who wants to be cool but his youth leads to him doing things the others don’t find cool, Randie’s always speaking her mind and quick to go for what she wants, and Derek is the goofy drummer who seems to have his head in the clouds. They might come off a little strong in the opening, but the more small scenes they have interacting or assessing their situation helps them grow on the player.

The quest for answers eventually takes them across America, to Europe, and beyond, and the different ares actually do have distinct feels to them both in the visuals you won’t get the best look at and the music featured for those portions. The game does begin with some fairly simple music only tracks to ease you in but doesn’t hold back for too long when it comes to note frequency, and as the game embraces fast music and hard metal you’ll definitely find a pretty strong challenge in trying to keep up on any difficulty but the lowest. A few songs perhaps bury the drums beneath the other instruments so it might be a little hard to follow the rhythm for those, but there are lot of quality tracks with catchy rhythms you can slip into once you get a feel for them. It’s hard to full explain the breadth of the kinds of metal music featured though, the game at first beginning with helpful genre names like Nu Metal and Rock but soon deciding to get silly with by saying a song is from the Avian Stoner genre or the Metalstein 3K genre. The genre usually at least sort of alludes to the tone with a flavor of the kinds of monsters your characters will fight during it. Some do have lyrics and pretty much as you get deeper in the game whips out better and better tracks since you can presumably handle the ones with more texture and force behind them.

 

Licensed tracks seem to mostly exist in the free play mode outside of the story. The extra modes do add a lot more longevity to the game if it is your cup of tea though, there being one that is essentially a rogue-like as you get to choose from a random set of new power-ups between each song to try and keep a streak of victories going as long as possible. The extra songs independent of the story can have unique enemies and environments, but it’s not like they’ll be any more merciful and give you a chance to get an eyeful of them. You can also play through the story stages in an endurance arcade mode with single play options if you’ve beat a song in story mode, but the game definitely tries to push you into the story where it’s better experienced anyway save for the slow world map navigation.

 

Double Kick Heroes does have a huge layer of customizability so you can tinker with many of the settings to try and find a way to play that suits you. One major setting is the car’s ability to move being either handled automatically or coming under the player’s control. By default it moves as it needs to, bosses the only ones that really would necessitate frequent movement with their attacks with huge impact zones, but you can sometimes feel the sting of being stuck in automatic when the enemies in the lower lane stay just out of reach of your gun until they’re almost upon you. Turning it on though means you’ll actually need to make time to look at the top area of the screen which isn’t always viable if you want to keep hitting notes accurately, so it’s another point where some tradeoff would have to be made in the game’s current form. There are also a few little technical flubs, character dialogue can sometimes be easy to accidentally skip when it takes its time displaying and one song I noticed notes spill over each other in an odd manner, but mostly it won’t impact the gameplay so you can enjoy the challenge of trying to keep up with some high tempo tunes.

THE VERDICT: If heavy metal is in your blood you might get a good amount out of Double Kick Heroes just for its love of the genre that seeps into every aspect of its design. However, as a rhythm game it does stumble a bit, primarily because the player is asked to keep a close eye on the incoming notes to succeed while the incredibly well done and creative visuals are almost deliberately made hard to look at. The music is varied in the types of metal it embraces and there is a very good selection overall both in the story and the extra tracks, but your work on the kick drums is complicated because of it, the gameplay putting up a good fight that really challenges the player but lessens their ability to appreciate extra touches when they’re trying to keep up with the energetic music.

 

And so, I give Double Kick Heroes for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. Double Kick Heroes is clinging to a bit of a life preserver in that it manages to keep its head just above being outright bad. The difficult scaling is off, but on anything but the lowest one you will find a legitimate challenge that can be thrilling to keep up with because it has little mercy in throwing notes your way. However, it can often feel like you’re just hammering the buttons too thanks to songs that don’t properly highlight the drum track your playing along to or rely too much on rapid fire note distribution over really following a rhythm. That mechanical enjoyment has to carry a lot of the experience though because you don’t get to soak in all the hard work put into the visual elements thanks to those packed track bars. I’d almost say Double Kick Heroes would be better if you did always know the enemies your car was shooting were generic baddies throughout since then you wouldn’t feel like you’re missing much and can focus on the music and the button inputs. However, that feeling of knowing something cool is going on and you can’t really indulge in it sours the main experience a little. Songs like Personal Hell and Bloody Asphalt are so good I’m tempted to add them to my music collection and the characters are a fun gang that do feel like a personable group of friends rather than just characters in a story, but everything comes back to the fundamental rhythm game design that can be entertaining but actively detracts from the substance of other parts of the game with its relative lack of substance.

 

Double Kick Heroes definitely pulls off its aesthetic well, a wonderful tribute to the metal genre in both its actual references and general attitude. It’s never too serious, it embraces the freedom of passionately letting loose, and it brings in plenty of killer visuals. Problem is, you’re stuck on the drums for it, and while a drummer’s work is definitely harder than it appears, having to handle that work yourself means you’re missing out on all the awesome things around you for gameplay that is somewhat solid but not what you’ll really be invested in. Double Kick Heroes feels like it gets by despite its rhythm game aspects rather than for them because of the weird degree of attention it puts in its many parts, but the post-apocalyptic adventures of the titular metal band aren’t a total wash thanks to the subpar gameplay being surrounded by quality art in many different forms.