Killsquad Preview at E3 2019
It’s becoming more and more rare to find a quality dungeon crawling co-op to jump into with your friends, but the team at Novarama have put together something special that you would be remiss to overlook. Killsquad takes the four-player co-op dungeon crawling shooter to another level, putting together a team of mercenaries with various skills and throwing them into a horde of enemies and forcing you all to work together to survive.
Set in the distant future, you and your team of badass mercenaries will take any job for the right price. Killsquad features four starting characters: the gunslinger with great ranged DPS, the tank with heavy melee power and high hit points, the spy with killer stealth skills, and the healer which not only drops health packs but can actually defend itself and resurrect fallen allies, making them a crucial member of the team. Enemy hordes barrel down on top of your team and even if you don’t like using a mic to communicate, the team seems to quickly and instinctively fall into their roles.
The Novarama team members are passionate fans of the classic Diablo series and it shows through in spades. Dominating the screen, obliterating your enemies, and using these bombastic killer powers comes so naturally to even mildly experienced players and what makes it even better is that the entire team will share experience to level up. That means when the gunslinger is blasting away enemies at a distance, the healer will level up all the same. When the tank is smashing enemies into a paste, the spy will grow and evolve. The team isn’t locked into one of each class either; my time hands-on with the game saw us play a squad of two gunslingers and two healers and we decimated the opposition.
What’s more, as you progress through the stage and level up you’ll unlock perks and upgrades to add on the fly, augmenting and changing your powers and skills the deeper you go. I upped the range of my high power ranged attack, turned my rounds into explosive shells, upped my damage, and so much more. These characters also have a variety of skins and gear to unlock to make each of them your own. Novarama has plans to release content in seasons, opening up new planets and missions to explore as well as adding new characters and classes periodically.
While Killsquad is releasing this Summer on Steam, the studio has plans to bring the game to consoles in 2020 and if my hands-on time with it at E3 2019 is any indication this title has so much potential to be one of the best rogue-lite co-op titles in recent memory. Novarama has put so much love into this beautiful and high octane shooter and it shows in every stone, gun, and explosion. For more coverage from E3 this year, be sure to keep it locked on COGconnected.
