Have you ever watched a movie trailer for a comedy and laughed so hard you decided on the spot the movie will be hilarious, only to realize upon watching it that all the good parts were all, in fact, in the trailer? That’s how playing Kill the Bad Guy feels.
The notion of killing random evildoers without their knowledge using various traps is intriguing. It falls in line with a number of puzzle games in which you set up traps for your adversaries to run into, this game adds an additional element of difficulty where you must construct the trap in real time, and if the bad guy sees you manipulating the world he will be alerted to your nefarious intentions and run away. It is simple enough, the bad guy will walk a certain route and the player is tasked with finding a way to catch him by surprise and kill him before he reaches the end of the stage and, in some cases, without being seen. Should he find his way to the end unscathed a day will pass and the player is given another try to set up their traps. The end score grades number of days and about thirty other arbitrary accomplishments such as collecting a tooth and or finding a passport randomly hidden in each level.
The game itself works fine, the traps seem to behave as intended even if timing their use can take some getting used to. The graphics are crisp and the music is catchy… at first. Which is also all that can be said for the game, it’s fun at first, and then, almost immediately, it loses its charm. Putting aside the ONE song that the game offers to play on infinite repeat, the ‘bad guy’ is always the same guy. Yes the start screen for the level will give you a new name and bio that is amusing maybe the first two times you read it (after that you won’t even bother) but the model is always that of a crash dummy. In a game who’s color palate is primarily black and white with the minimal amount of textures possible in a game you would think they could put some time into making individual faces, even if they were cartoony.
The singular bad guy model would even be forgivable if my next complaint were not true. The deaths are all the same. Yes you can throw a dead dog, or drop a piano or hit him with a car, but the bad guy will always ragdoll and blood effects will splatter. Meaning after an hour of trying to figure out a new creative way to kill him, the result will look about the same as when I spent 4 seconds backing a car into him on the first level. In a game where killing the bad guy is the huge draw, his deaths should be far more spectacular. There are slight variations, but nothing that would make you feel like your time was well spent in trying the crazy difficult trap setup vs the easy one on any given stage.
My frustration furthered when I realized the game had no restart level function. At first I assumed it was to keep the player from gaming the system, since one of the level quests is to kill the bad guy on the first day. Meaning an achievement obsessed player could just try until they succeed, restart the level and play out the solution on the first day. However since you can play any of the levels over to reach a higher score it is simply a matter of convenience.
There are a number of other flaws that make the game unnecessarily difficult, for instance items do not display a name when selected. That lead to moments where I was trying to kill the bad guy with something I couldn’t identify nor could I discern how it was even supposed to be used. The points system is more than a little irritating since every single objective is busy work and for some reason each level has a secret one which is absurd to say the least.
Overall this isn’t a bad game, it has flaws, yes, but it works and if you’re bored and like puzzle games it can be an interesting time reliever. However, at a price point of $14.99 every fault is exacerbated and the minor errors become inexcusable failures. If it were free or even $0.99 I could be more lenient with the score, but not at this price. It gets a 5 out of 10.
I do not recommend Kill the Bad Guy unless it’s a Steam sale, you are bored, love puzzles, and really don’t want your dollar.
-Alana Clarke