Beyond Needing a Shower

Let me tell you a little bit about the Cavalry Carbine.  It’s one of the first weapons you get in Beyond Citadel but it was also the most used weapon I had in my repertoire.  While not packing the pizazz of other weaponry, a simple single-cartridge reloaded carbine packs the punch if you know where to aim.  Facing countless enemies of all sizes and stature, nothing quite beats aiming down the sights and popping a bullet through the head of an enemy, showcasing a used shell plinking on the ground and sliding a fresh bullet in ready for the next enemy unfortunate enough to be in front of you.

…wait, you want to know about the actual game?  Uh, um.  Well.  Alright.

Beyond Citadel is the sequel to 2020’s The Citadel, a Doom-esque FPS shooter with 2.5D graphics, a surprisingly deep weapon mechanic system, and an uncomfortable affinity for anime girls.  You play as The Martyr, the last resort of the Seven Angels, guardians of humankind, that is led by a mysterious signal to overthrow the seven Trumpeters of the Apocalypse.  It’s your job to save the world from impending doom, and boy howdy will you be given the tools to do so.

Beyond Citadel basks in its love for its weaponry.  There are over 2 dozen weapons to choose from and each feels like it’s been given a level of care often rescinded in other titles.  While it takes some time to get used to it, the eject-reload-cock button combo of each gun really heightens the tension and visceral feel of each weapon, whether it be slapping in shotgun shells and pumping for your next kill or releasing a mag quickly to pull a freshly loaded one into your assault rifle, to sliding spent cartridges out of your .50 cal Whalegun after each shot.  There’s a lot of time and effort put into this and it shows on every shot fired.

Guns in this world, much like everything around you, can be put into disarray and you’ll have to handle their deterioration after extended use.  Certain enemies will drop repair pieces to help keep your guns in tip-top shape, but eventually you’ll deal with a jam, which is violently fixed by frantically cocking your weapon to get the jam out.  The first few times this happens in a fight, you’re terrified because it’s not in your mental rhythm of slinging rounds, but your foes don’t care and you better fix it quickly or swap weapons.  

While the guns feel good, the movement is right on par, making the gameplay loop of Beyond Citadel enjoyably refreshing and rewarding. Modern DOOM fans will be very used to the style of movement, which combines double jumps, double dashes, and corner peeking.  Firefights are fast and frantic, and a frenetic pace is commonplace amongst the near 40 levels to traverse through.  The combination of tight controls and an advanced level of gunplay really puts Beyond Citadel above and beyond other titles within the genre.  For some players, a great gameplay loop is all that is needed to enjoy themselves, but I would be remiss if I didn’t note just about everything else going on in Beyond Citadel, because there is a whole bag of mixed emotions to go along with everything nice said above.

I’ve seen the term “gooner shooter” being thrown around amongst forums regarding Beyond Citadel and I hate that I can’t think of a better term.  The Martyr is, well, scantily clad to say the least, entering combat with about as much thread to tie a couple shoes together.  I refuse to elaborate on the secret art you can find in each level, but just know art pieces like Interrogation 1 and 2 just weren’t for me.  Your enemies, coated in much more armor than you, are anime girls all the same and you’ll know what they look like due to the hyper-violence Beyond Citadel instills in every bullet.  Headshots will blow through helmets, leaving rolled back eyes in crumbled messes after blood-curdling screams and gurgles.  Shots to the chest will leave enemies on the ground weakly palpitating for their last breaths until they succumb to their wounds or you evoke Rule #2 from Zombieland.  Shots to the stomach will leave enemies trying to keep their intestines from flooding out while trying desperately to get final shots at you before dying.

It’s…unnerving, uncomfortable, and slightly perverse in its detail.  You are dealing with the fact that it’s you or them, but in no case did I ever feel great when killing any of these enemies knowing it’s been coded and developed for me to hear exactly how bad getting hit by any of these guns can be.  When you die, you have instances where your last moments are seeing the bottom half of your body ripped from you, insides oozed out for the enemies to continue beating on your soon-to-be-corpse.  Seeing the gore and viscera with newly-dead eyes staring back at me from heads separated from their spine and their internal remains spewed across the cold floor did not make me feel well.  It’s not a slight on the game itself, but if that is what it wanted, it certainly did its job.

There are some fun instances of level design, especially when corridors get tight and snap shooting is necessary to leave with a clean bill of health.  But Beyond Citadel eventually opens its levels to great lengths, and the bigger the level the worse the experience I had.  A lot of your time will be spent avoiding enemy fire to get close enough to use the weapons you can or want, and this is done naturally in earlier levels at a much better pace.  These later, bigger levels suffer from extending level length by subjecting you to the “find 4 to proceed” trope that no level benefits from. It serves only as an obstacle to add more enemies in front of you or force you to drag your face across every inch of the level to find the one switch you’re missing.  Some levels have multiple rooms that will increase their runtime by 10-20 minutes, which feels like an eternity.

Beyond Citadel also suffers from a lack of cohesion between levels.  There is clearly a lot the developer wanted to do with this game, but the whiplash level to level in each zone feels disjointed.  There’s no real reason as to why certain levels couldn’t all be meshed together in a single zone but you’ll go from claustrophobic corridor corner shooting with a shotgun, to playing peek-a-boo with snipers and mortars in wide open spaces to city-spanning mech levels against hundreds of enemies.  Playing to a specific mechanic or leaning into a certain style of area could allow certain weapons to flourish or give the player an opportunity to focus on a specific obstacle and master it; you could blend all these mechanics into later levels to allow the progression of the player to shine against a tough-built level, but none of these ideas are really brought to fruition.

Each zone ends with a stumble as each of the bosses provide some interesting concepts but ultimately succumb to being bullet sponges with SHMUP-like attacks and smaller mobs to cause slight confusion and frustration.  None end up being worth writing about and don’t add much other than plot-based progression at the cost of enjoyment.  This is even more increased if you’ve been finding the secret modules in each zone that allow you to level up one of 7 virtues, think stats in your everyday RPG but catered here to specific abilities. Finding the higher tiers of armor will allow you to inevitably ignore damage and just focus on hitting the big stationary boss target.  For the record, I played on the default Medium difficulty but there are 3 levels of difficulty and sliders to adjust specific levels of difficulty if the game feels too easy or hard.

Nothing disappoints more than the final zone and in turn, the ending of Beyond Citadel.  Once you have disposed of what for all intents and purposes felt like the final boss, you are then fed into a final “Epilogue” zone that is twice as long as any zone you’ve played, is built entirely to be a platforming section, and is focused on a wallrunning mechanic that is built specifically for these stages only.  Why this wasn’t just slotted before the final boss confuses me still as I write this. It felt like cut content that the developer just did not want to give up on, but again: disjointedness rears its ugly head throughout the game.  Once this is done, the plot-specific pieces to the puzzle are slotted in, you’re greeted with a final-final boss that really isn’t, and then you’re put in a final room to choose between one of two options.  The second option isn’t really…explained?  You’re given a choice between two outcomes, but only one outcome is highlighted to do, so the illusion of choice is gone as it points to Option A like a Call of Duty campaign.  Once you do either ending, the game just…ends?  You’re given a line of text and the game returns to the title screen.

There is the opportunity to do a New Game+ and explore the EX levels that are unlocked after each Zone clearance, but after 13 hours I had more than had my fill.  I hate that Beyond Citadel provides some of the snappiest and satisfying gunplay I’ve played in years as it’s surrounded by lack of cohesiveness, stability, player decision-making, and questionable artistic choices.  There’s a fine chance that the vision Doekuramori had for Beyond Citadel was not made for tastes like mine, but turning off the gore and avoiding having to look over your shoulder whenever you find a collectible still doesn’t remove the abhorrent exterior surrounding a promising love for gunplay.

3/10