Beyond Citadel

2025-08-02
It's 2025 and Boomer shooters are out and Gooner shooters are in. And you know what? I'm kind of into it. I mean I'm not into the actual extremely horny "easter eggs" of the main character in various states of undress with such edifying titles as "Interrogation I", "Captured", "Skin Suit" and who could forget "Interrogation II"? No, what I'm into is the oddly OCD controls of the guns. The satisfying chunk-chunk-chunk of loading individual rounds into your lever-action rifle. The heartbreak when you accidentally hit reload too fast and throw away a clip full of ammunition. And weirdly these two concepts seem inseparable in Beyond Citadel. You cannot separate the gooning from the shooting. The same mind that concocted one of the most complicated--and fun--representations of guns in a game had to spew some straight horndog, incesty, borderline hentai art at you.

Once you've gone through the tutorial and mastered the rite of reloading, invoking the 5 or so buttons in their proper order, you can move on to the real meat of the game: shooting women. Yeah it took me a bit to realize but every enemy is a woman. I think there's some lore reason for all of this but the mixture of a pretty bad English translation with the aforementioned horniness made me really not want to spend too much time thinking about the world. But the "Everyone you kill is a woman" bit was hard to miss given 1) there's a whole lot of anime woman screaming going on as you blast through these levels and 2) when you notice a the decapitated head staring at you from the ground is a woman’s for the 20th time in a row, it comes across clear.

I mentioned the "meat" of the game and Golly Gee Willikers there is some HYPER-violent gore going on here. Enemies explode with a pleasing "splat" sound with gibs flying everywhere but like the rest of the art in the game it's a consistent 2D anime style. So you got anime heads, anime legs, anime arms popping off like confetti. Only it's even more detailed such that each shot to a specific part will often cause specific destruction to that part of the body. I'll be honest, it rules. Not in the sense that I'm Mr. Psycho Killer Buffalo Bill or anything but because it adds another layer of feedback to the precision of the shooting. You land a long distance shot and then come closer to see whether you hit your mark, "Yer goddam right that was a headshot."

Oo and those long distance shots. Every bullet in this game has a story. You load it into the gun, you cock the gun, you fire it, you watch the bullet sail off, drop over a long enough distance, and if you hit your mark you'll hear a splat. Every gun has different characteristics that you get a feel for. My favorite was getting good at basically lobbing long distance shots with the lever-action rifle. At a certain distance enemies won't engage with you so you can just take your time picking them off one by one after you get a feel for lining up your shots over long distances. It helps then that the game's difficulty is pretty enormous unless you spend your time picking off enemies and landing consistent headshots. Doing something hard for the sake of doing something hard isn’t fun but doing it because it makes you smart is always fun.

There's dogshit mixed in with all the severed body parts flying about to be sure. For every fun level of sniping enemies there are excruciating underwater levels or boring bosses you do loops around a static arena shooting at. The vehicle sections initially seem like a fun bit of variety but the sparse city levels they're always a part of are the most boring levels by far. Alleviating some of these pain points is a really flexible set of difficulty options which I heartily used to just basically cruise through the myriad of trash levels in here.

I've rambled on long enough so I'll end by saying while the gore and horniness and hit-or-miss level design may turn away some, if you stick it out you'll find one of the most mechanically satisfying shooters I've ever played.