[Click here to start from the first progress log]

All right, so I reached the end of Double Kick Heroes‘ current content, and it was a lot of fun. The flashing is still headache-inducing (consider that a warning against clicking any of the embedded videos if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing), and the difficulty has ramped up and made songs such a chaotic flurry of notes that I’m not sure how the rest of the game could possibly become any harder without delving into exotic, unpredictable time signatures, but getting through these chaotic songs was every bit as rewarding as expected. This game’s a few tweaks away from greatness.

Playing around with controller placement

Obviously you have no way of seeing it, but I started experimenting with different ways of holding the controller around this point in the game since the normal way made it way too difficult to keep up with the “normal” A and B notes while still being able to reach X for grenade notes. Eventually I settled on putting the controller down and devoting a finger to each rather than asking my thumb to keep up entirely on its own, and while this took some getting used to at first, it was a much less cramp-inducing way of keeping up with Double Kick Heroes’ rapid succession of notes.

A more comfortable method of playing wasn’t enough to make me an expert at the game or anything, but it allowed me to enjoy stages much more by making them feel fairer; missing a couple notes and totally losing your sense of place in a song can effectively be a death sentence when you’re using nothing but your thumb, and I found it significantly easier to recover while using multiple fingers. Plus, faster songs with lots of notes can actually turn the zombies chasing the car into an afterthought since each of those notes is an attack. The difficulty comes from rapid grenade notes (since you only have one button for that one) and trying to avoid mashing buttons when you’re not supposed to, as this disadvantages you by overheating the guns.

That doesn’t work for boss fights

Boss fights often require you to press up and down to avoid attacks while keeping up with the music, so I eventually had to go back to using my thumb for everything so that my left hand could be on movement duty. The result was predictably ugly, as I missed a bunch of notes and played it safe enough that the song ended before the boss had died. While making it to the end of a normal stage’s song causes all of the remaining zombies to automatically be wiped out, leaving a boss intact causes it to saunter up and insta-kill you regardless of your remaining lives. Still, I wouldn’t say that I wasn’t having fun here (aside from the migraine-inducing flashing, of course), and even this speed bump was overcome without issue on a second attempt.

And that’s it for now

After that boss fight, you reach a “work in progress” bridge and the image above. Double Kick Heroes also has a custom music import function so that you can make your own stages, but my handful of attempts ended in an error message about not being able to contact a server, with the game ultimately crashing. This technically isn’t even in Early Access yet, though, so that’s not something that I’m holding against it at the moment. It looks to be a fun feature, so I look forward to playing around with that in the future (and creating something truly ridiculous, like a chaotic Barney the Dinosaur song or sea shanty that uses nothing but grenade notes).

[Click here to go to Double Kick Heroes log #1]

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