There aren’t many first-person games in the vein of Hotline Miami. I can only think of a couple off the top of my head, so when I saw one using sprites that get cut in half with a katana, I knew I had to play Lightning Katana. From the outset, it was clear to me that the game had a lot of potential, a feeling which remained when I experienced its controls and gameplay for myself. There’s some depth here and the game can be quite fun. However, its brevity leaves it mostly without a difficulty curve and its potential is fairly untapped.
To be clear, I don’t take issue with short games. David Szymanski’s recent game Butcher’s Creek is just a couple of hours long, but I felt it was well paced and had the right length for its systems. Lightning Katana might be beatable in a single hour, depending on how well you adapt, which feels like too little for what its gameplay offers. The game’s premise is that the main character’s dog was kicked by a yakuza, although I don’t recall seeing this explained in the opening. The protagonist then goes after the yakuza with their sword in tow.
Lightning Katana kicks off with two short tutorial missions, followed by five regular missions and a boss. The levels can be freely replayed and are all graded. Great performance is rewarded with an S grade, while making it through levels with an unbroken combo (and probably taking no damage) seems to get you a P (for perfect!) It’s a good system and killing your way through the levels without stopping, slicing through everything on the way, satisfies in a notable way. You have access to a katana for said slicing, of course. Hitting foes grants you energy you can then use to shoot bullets with a finger gun, which I thought was a cute choice.
Enemies all get cut in half down the middle when you hit them, which was as great touch. You also have a parry, dodge, and the ability to use three elemental abilities dropped by Lightning Katana‘s three elemental foes. Dodging grants invulnerability frames, so it’s great for getting out of the way of projectiles and other hazards. You can even kick enemies, as well as kick objects into enemies and walls (plus there are secrets here and there.) Enemies flash yellow right before attacking, and if you press parry, you’ll block the attack and be able to heal yourself if you counterattack. It’s a fairly involved system and I think the devs did a terrific job with the MC’s kit.
Special abilities are single use and include shooting an electric beam, dashing to a foe and slashing them, or throwing a fireball with a very short range that’s less than useful. Lightning Katana plays well, as it’s fast and fluid, although you can’t slash enemies as quickly as I would have liked. There’s a noticeable cooldown between slashes, so don’t expect to be able to combo or spam. I’d very much like to see a full game using these mechanics one day, as I think the gameplay has the chops to support one. With that said, I’m more ambivalent here due to the levels themselves.
Lightning Katana doesn’t really have a difficulty curve – it teaches you the basics and throws you into the deep end before you can really come to terms with them. The game manages health a bit differently than many. The first time I died, I didn’t know that I could only take two hits, so I remained unsure as to how much damage I could take. If there’s no red ring around the screen, you have full health, if there is, you have half. Parrying enemies and then landing a counter-attack will heal you, a terrific feature.
The level design itself is mostly fine, although it isn’t as memorable as I had hoped it’d be. The difficulty goes up and down randomly too, which threw me off. At one point, you enter into an arena during a level and it wants you to kill everything before making it to the exit. It’s a substantial difficulty spike, especially since I barely knew how to play the game when it asked me to get through it. However, it did function as a skill check in this way. I just usually don’t prefer the brick wall method (throw yourself at it until you get it) in games.
Some aspects of the level design do require memorising enemy spawns, as it’s not uncommon to get killed by an enemy that spawned behind you or from a location you didn’t have eyes on, such as deeper within a corridor that you can’t see within. A lot of it just felt haphazard to me, lacking the extreme precision these sorts of games demand from their design. And some of the levels are just somewhat poor. One level is basically a series of target ranges. It kills the pacing and is easily the worst one of the bunch, as the idea of a target range doesn’t really flow all that well with the rest of the game.
Another level requires you to rush ahead of a wave of burning chili (what??) that kills you if it touches you. This felt a bit too fast to me, as it kills you unless you spam your dodge to get through certain sections. But the absolute worst part of Lightning Katana is its final boss. You need to get a certain number of S rankings to unlock it, which isn’t too big of a deal at all. This fight is three phases. I found phase one kind of obnoxious, and phase two tedious. Phase three is a combination of the first two, alongside respawning enemies.
About a third of my playtime with the game was the boss level alone. The third phase feels unnecessarily overkitted and basically requires you to master the parry, despite you not really needing to use it much during the actual levels. I strongly disliked this fight overall and found it incredibly frustrating, even if it is perfectly doable with some practice. But then you beat the boss and the game is over. You can replay levels to try and get better ranks or go through the game’s gauntlet, which just puts you in an area where the game’s five enemy types spawn endlessly, so that’ll give leaderboard chasers some extra replay value.
I have to say, when the game works at its best, it flows pretty impressively. Sometimes enemies are laid out in a way that you’ll be able to chain dropped abilities to zoom through the levels. I just wish there was more here. Some levels can be completed in under 20 seconds without too much hassle at all. You can restart a level by holding the R key at any time, but sometimes I found that doing this while taking damage would have me respawn with a red screen that required another restart to get rid of.
There are also some problems with achievements. I got the achievement for getting all S ranks despite the fact that I very much didn’t do that. I also found that the game was very inconsistent in regard to whether it would swap between the katana and pistol (you should really be able to use both without swapping,) plus sometimes abilities wouldn’t use when I pressed the relevant button.
My feelings on Lightning Katana are rather mixed. While I do enjoy the gameplay and mechanics, there’s too little content to really put them through their paces, plus the levels themselves are of mixed quality. Capping it all off with a frustrating boss fight and it’s a bit tough to recommend this one. The game retails for $8 USD, so it won’t exactly break the bank, but the amount on offer here seems low even at that, as it’s basically $1 per (very short) level. As I said, there’s plenty of potential for something noteworthy down the line, but this isn’t quite there yet.
Lightning Katana: Featuring impressive gameplay that doesn't last long enough to put the systems through their paces, Lightning Katana showcases a fair amount of skill, there just isn't enough game. – Andrew Farrell
