IF VIOLENCE, GORE, STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEXUAL IMAGERY BOTHERS YOU, DO NOT READ AHEAD.
I pace the floor of my decrepit little concrete box I call a home. The mold propagates itself against the yellowing walls, sickly sweet smells from the bathroom and mildew from the carpet combine to overwhelm the senses. Insects chitter and chatter along the window panes, single-file lines across my desk, inside my walls. Hanging nearby, a worn corkboard. Pin-cushioned to hell and back, adorned with red strings here and there and everywhere. Photos, screenshots, antediluvian passages and shellac phrases dress the board in a coat of schizophrenic freak-out cut and designed by Carol Christian Poell. A smoldering cigarette clings to dear life in between my lips, each waft of smoke is another year of spending time with my future children slipped through my blistered hands. In my shaking right hand is the shittiest cup of coffee known to man, coffee grinds float up to the surface, bobbing up for a second of air, to remind me of the dreck I put into my cage of languid flesh and disappear back into this water-downed swill. Creak, creak, creak goes the floorboards as I carve a groove into the wood underneath my feet. Creak, creak, creak goes my mind as it tries to piece together my little foray into madness made digital. Creak, creak, creak is the echoing sound in this tiny room of mine, bouncing off these walls of mold and concrete. I take another sip of my dogshit brew and recoil, “Nah, it needs to taste like dying” I croak from my fetid maw. I place the cup down and make my way to the ramshackled shelf that’s fashioned from rotted wood and thumbtacks I smashed into the lumber in order to avoid using nails. Tonight, we let the Kraken do the talkin’, I shudder as I pour this pitch black hell into the coffee, remembering the spinning nights of brimstone and gnashing teeth spent with good Ol’ Jackie Dan. I sip. “It tastes like the closed gates of Heaven”, nodding along in awe at whatever insipid poetic nothings come from my mouth. The flickering light above signals for me to snap out of my shitty imitation of Kerouacian protagonist quips. Oh, the sadness of the lights this night! I finally turn my attention to this godforsaken corkboard, already blood and anguish flood my brain in waves. I try to make sense of my emotions, of what I just played. The computer screen I don’t dare look at hums and sings a single note song to beckon the end of the world. Gritting teeth and balled fists, I slam my hand against the corkboard. Once, twice, three times now, BANG, BANG, BANG. Mother Dark, dismissing anguish, adorns herself in all her charms to pay homage to the slumber of this incarnation of modesty and sanity I display. Emotions swell and bubble to the surface. I break. My mouth opens as I shout at the shadows and bugs around me.
DOEKURAMORI! YOU BASTARD! YOU JAPANESE BASTARD, YOU’VE DONE IT AGAIN!! YOU’VE DONE IT AGAIN!!!! HOW DID YOU DO IT?! HOW DID YOU IMPROVE UPON PERFECTION?!?! HOW DO YOU TAKE THE CITADEL AND JUST ABSOLUTELY COOK UP SOME FUCKING PURE WOK WORKS?! Now, dear reader, it would benefit you to understand why I am screeching at the walls and at the shadows that dance around my windowless Chinese tenement. You see, I absolutely adore The Citadel and every single spattering of guts and gore that fills its metal chassis which is fit to burst with blood. Having said that, as much as I adore The Citadel, I definitely know the reputation that it and it’s sequel have, believe me. “Isn’t that that gooner game that has anime girls die in horrible ways? Isn’t it a guro game?” and whatever dogshit generalizations braindead, club-foot, dented-in forehead idiots and youtubers lob at this game because heaven forbid we engage with games that have some titillation and gore with some nuance and critical-thinking(we’ll clap and bark like seals when Sonya Blade gets her guts thrown all over a dirt road all day, I guess). I’m not here to get on some soapbox and preach to you about The Citadel as we are here to discuss the sequel to it, but I will say that it is a very good game that I lovingly embrace, gore and scantily clad protags included. Now, onto the matter at hand.
MOTHERFUCKING BEYOND CITADEL! The Martyr is not playing around this time around. I’m assuming if you clicked on this review, you must have some sort of openness to media and therefore, have some interest in Beyond Citadel. As for me, I have been eagerly anticipating the sequel to The Citadel with bated breath and the shakes something fierce, you’d almost mistake me as some strung-out background character from The Maxx.
Let’s get started by talking about the juice, the sauce, the damn game-play. Heaven above, and here I thought the gun-play in The Citadel felt chunky and visceral, but Beyond Citadel doesn’t only raise the bar higher, it grabs it and launches it into the stratosphere with the speed of a rocket. First and foremost, let’s talk about the reloading of all things. Doekuramori, in their infinite wisdom (or insanity), overhauled the idea of reloading, tinkered with it, hunched over it, the metaphorical clinks of hammers and clanks of wretches must’ve been the amphetaminic staccato orchestra to feed the spasmodic fever that consumed Doekuramori’s mind while he created the best reloading I’ve ever touched with my unworthy hands.
“””Quick””” rundown for anyone who hasn’t played this, let’s say that in the middle of a firefight, you’re running out of ammo, what do you do? Obviously, you press R and reload the magazine, years upon years of FPS knowledge has taught us this. But in Beyond Citadel, when you do this, you drop your magazine, losing whatever other ammo was in there. Whatever, some games make you lose whatever ammo is in the magazine if you do it when it’s not empty, so? In Beyond Citadel, ammo and magazines are two separate things. Let’s say you have 60 assault rifle bullets and each magazine holds about 20 bullets, you have 4 magazines, simple math, only 3 of the 4 magazines will be filled, yeah? With how Beyond Citadel works, you can take some of the bullets from one magazine and transfer, let’s say, 10 bullets into the 4th magazine. Why would you wanna do that? Easy, most of the weapons in Beyond Citadel allows you to either manually reload one bullet at a time or reload using the magazine. Manually reloading allows you to reload however many as you want without any worries of losing any ammo, but it’s pretty slow while reloading the magazine is quick and easy, one-two pop, perfect during a intense firefight where you need to be on the move or else a shotgunner can/will literally rip the skin from your skull in under 3 seconds or your pizza is free. The downside? If you reload with ammo still in the mag, the ammo goes with it down onto the floor. Don’t worry, dear reader, the ammo isn’t lost, you can just pick the mag back up from the floor, simple as (or just individual bullets because Doekuramori is insane and allows you to eject bullets one by one as well), but see how well that goes for you when one of God’s left-over forsaken trumpeters blows its best cover of Giant Steps straight up your ass. From there, we can go onto actually firing your weapons at the unfortunate lost souls you are tasked with putting down, essentially I’m trying to sell you on the core of the game. This will be the easiest part of the review as this game just has stellar gun-play, simple as. The guns sound like the 7th Seal has opened, heaven has fallen onto what can barely be described as Earth in the form of this arsenal. We got pistols, revolvers, blunderbusses, shotguns, autoshotties, double-barrel, sawn-offs, assault rifles, bolt-actions, SMGs, LMGs, guns that turn you into stone, fusion weapons, mechs, attack helicopters, rocket launchers, grenades, C4, missile strikes, karambits, swords, axes, your fists, hell, I’ll even throw in a Liu Kang flying kick! Usually it’s 19.99, but for you, my friend? It’s on the house ‘,;). Now, do these tools of the apocalypse sounds as destructive as they should?
You bet your ass they do. The sound design on these things, god, it’s heaven to a simple boy like myself. The sound of the angels up above singing for me and me alone as I unload steel upon the organs of my lost sisters. The gnashing of teeth and tearing of sinew are the chorus that signals the end times. My Automag is my violin, my assault rifle my cello, the sawn-off plays revelatory bass with every heavy pull of the trigger. The songs within each whistling bullet are delusions of suicidal ramblers in metropolitan mazes. They are exercises in self-flagellation that reach a paranoid pathos through a monolithic and existential catalepsy. The small, but relentless sound texture is suddenly pierced by desperate, ghastly cries that arise from nothing, amorphous, and cling to the walls of endless skyscrapers...and to my ears because if you somehow didn’t immediately kill whatever enemy that was on the receiving end of 100 shotgun pellets to the sternum, you’d have to listen to their wheezing and death rattles. I dunno about you or your own way of life, but I’m not particularly comfortable with having to hear and see a cute anime girl trying her hardest to keep her entrails inside her body stare into your eyes with tears in hers. It makes me feel really bad. I immediately take them out of their misery. It’s incredible. Something so simple effecting me this much throughout my entire playthrough, I consistently felt bad whenever I didn’t immediately kill every single enemy that crossed my path. The game really plays into this as well. Using your flamethrower on any enemy is opening the door way to Hell. The enemies SCREAM for their life, running around as their eyeballls bubble and melt in their eye sockets and their skin sloughs off the bone. The flamethrower is VERY effective, but man, did I wince whenever I lit someone up. It’s not all good though. If you’ve played through The Citadel, you’ll know that Doekuramori used a pitched up Doom scream for the enemies. Whenever you killed an enemy, you’ll hear it, just slightly different pitches so it’s not just one sound byte. It’s, admittedly, not good and does take you out of the game in the beginning. Honestly thought, that’s about the only complaint I have with the game and it’s fairly minor at that.
The soundtrack, as opposed to the carnage that you see, is almost all gentle and contemplative piano music, sometimes a rousing classical piece, but it is always subdued. This isn't a negative by any sense of the word. I personally found that it really gave the player this soft soundtrack to usher in post-apocalyptic world that itself is decaying further. Some songs paired with the bloodshed and with the set pieces present from level to level give it this cinematic feel. I love it.
Another improvement is the story-telling and the writing. This is something I won’t get into deeply as I do think it deserves to be experienced blind and not heard from this slovenly griot before you. In the first game, it only fed you crumbs here and there via dialogue with the shopkeep and one other NPC you’d talk to at the end of a chapter. In Beyond Citadel, you get notes, logs, snippets at the beginning of chapters, conversations with a lot more NPCs, flashbacks, lore after beating a boss. All of it detailing a truly lost world, it's manic, it's a decay only found in Krasznahorkai's Satantango. Sludgey and wet, the story shows you exactly what it want to show you. It left me ravenous, teeth snapping and tearing over every morsel it gave me. It’s a truly welcome addition, the world in the first game begged to be expanded upon, Doekuramori seemed to think so as well and decided to give us hungry chicks a feast. It’s a lot more effective this time too. There is a moment in this game that took me by surprise, hit me like a truck and I couldn’t bring myself to play the game for a week. We are in the middle of the year and I still have yet to find a game to beat out Beyond Citadel as my game of the year. It has entered into my top 5 games of all time. Perfection. Godliness. Dread. Hopeless.
There is no hope to be found in these salt piles, no light to be seen from behind the clouds. It is a bleak world and there is no going back. All you and the Martyr can do is try to do what you can with what you got, redemption and punishment for the past, for forbidden love, tainted in sin and drenched in sacrilege. We are by doom to pay; rather such acts of contumacy will provoke the Highest to make death in us live: then let us seek some safer resolution.
One shotgun shell at a time.
Shout out to you, Doekuramori, for doubling down on the fanservice, I eagerly await whatever you make in the future. Also seeing the screen-tearing and no v-sync option was like seeing an old friend.
Pros
- + Outstanding Moment to Moment Action
- + Incredibly Satisfying Gunplay
- + Large Enemy Variety
- + Excellent Pixel Graphics and Gore
- + A Solid Story That Doesn't Overstay Its Welcome
Cons
- - Some Crashes Here and There
- - Slowdown When Gore Piles Up
- - Overusage of Some Sound Bytes
- - Consistent Screen-Tearing
10
Gameplay
9
Graphics
8
Story
9
Sound
9
Replayability
10
out of 10
Overall
A FPS masterpiece that will, unfortunately, filter some due to both the reputation it has and for some of the subject matter in it, but history will most certainly look favorably at this welcome inclusion to the genre. Do not pass this game up.
