One character can dual wield swords and guns while another can dodge roll, and those abilities significantly change you approach combat.Ĭharlie Murder isn’t that hard in the beginning (which makes the constant loot drops and new environments even more enticing).
These abilities are the major differentiator between the characters. As you fight, you earn more followers to your imitation Twitter account, which levels you up and earns you a new passive ability. They’re fun to experiment with, but they won’t change how you play. You acquire the former from tattoo parlors, and each character has a different set of anar-chis that really aren’t all that different from each other.
#CHARLIE MURDER REVIEW UPGRADE#
The combat is simple as there’s only one actual combo, but your “Anar-Chi” powers and upgrade abilities provide enough variety to keep it interesting. It’s great, all of it, and it’s one of the reasons that you’ll keep playing, or at the very least keep the game on pause in the background while you do something else. When Charlie sings it’s impossible to tell if there are actual lyrics or if he’s just screaming and mumbling into the mic. There’s also the occasional flashback where we get to see Charlie Murder perform, and these scenes play out like a quick-time event version of Rock Band, with each player given different inputs depending on what instrument their character is playing. All the music sounds oddly distant, like it’s coming out of bad speakers. The anarchist dark rock of Charlie Murder feels right at home with the devils, demons, and decapitations. What the loot lacks in aesthetic appreciation, the music more than makes up for it. Personally, I would have loved to play the whole game in a hockey mask with a machete, but the new and better stuff comes so fast that every cool costume is fleeting. The constant influx of new stuff makes for an addictive gameplay loop, but the downside is that we never have any piece of equipment long enough to appreciate it. However, there aren’t enough statistics on the loot to make it a factor in strategy, so every new piece is always better than every old piece.
This flood of loot creates an insatiable desire for more, turning us into gluttons, risking our lives to grab a shirt or hat in the middle in a fight. There’s so much that drops so fast you’ll be switching equipment and selling stuff every 10 minutes, if that. The loot is by far the biggest hook here. New locations, enemies, weapons, items, loot are all dropped into your lap at such a breathless pace that you’ll never turn your bleary eyes away from the screen. The aesthetics sweep you up, constantly seducing you with new things to see and kill and kill with. Once you stop trying to understand the story and just go with it, Charlie Murder becomes enthralling. Fighting witches and pirates in a cemetery while zombies snipe at you from afar? Sure, why not? When you’re in the midst of it, you have to learn to let go and just accept the madness. Now, how do they fit together? Why is there a Hamburger Homunculus in this burger joint? What the fuck is a Hamburger Homunculus? In retrospect, it all makes more sense, but that’s only thanks to the benefit of hindsight. You fight a demon boss that’s part of Paul’s band then another demon boss that’s not part of Paul’s band. It’s stuffed with zombies, ninjas, pirates, a succubus, giant spiders, mer-monsters, ghosts, skeletons, and a whole slew of disturbingly imaginative demons and monsters.Īs a result, it’s a great game to watch, but it’s also damn weird. Charlie Murder feels like an homage to every horror thing ever created. The story is really a justification to revel in the bizarre and the horrific. An end credits montage that tracks Charlie and Paul through their adolescence has more emotional resonance than anything else in the game, but that’s mainly because the rest of the game doesn’t try. Instead it’s doled out in bits and pieces over the course of the game, which goes a long way in justifying your ambivalence towards it. which somehow unleashes a hell of horrors upon the world. Paul gets pissed, makes a deal with the devil, and receives his own demonic band. In short: Charlie and Paul were going to start a band, but Charlie betrays his pal and starts his own band, the titular Charlie Murder. But narratively, it’s way more interested in its story than you’ll ever be. Mechanically, it’s a smart mix of genres: a classic four player side-scrolling beat-‘em-up with a tremendous amount of loot that is fun and simple to understand.
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