Kill Strain Review

The moment-to-moment gameplay can be a little confusing, but when you find your feet it gets more satisfying. As a mercenary you're at your most effective strapped into the gigantic Mech suits that serve as an 'ultimate' ability. These can tear turrets asunder and let you stand toe-to-toe with those on the Strain team. The best way to get access to them is by delivering resources from one part of the map to the other. You run these resources through the map while dipping into sporadic firefights and then strap yourself into your big mech suit for 30 seconds of frantic destruction, then go back to running stuff around.

Kill Strain's biggest problem is a lack of depth. Despite wanting to play like a MOBA and doing its best to make it feel that way, it doesn't feel particularly compelling, with neither the gameplay nor character interactions being interesting enough to bring you back. It's hard to say whether high-level strategies will emerge to keep it fresh, but the addition of more content will probably offer up more options.


There are plenty of characters to choose from, but there's just a single map and it gets old quite quickly. The idea of more mutants, mercenaries and maps has been floated as coming 'after release' with the suggestion they'll be added fairly regularly once the launch is out of the way, but there's an old games industry adage that you can only launch your game once and with this launch, Sony certainly isn't delivering the best version of Kill Strain.

I'm hoping that as a first party title it'll benefit from Sony's continued support and might be given room to breathe and find its audience because, at its very top level, Kill Strain is a lot of fun. The concept is nice; Kill Strain sucked me in with its triple threat dynamic, and I adore the Strain's ability to grow a team, but its delivery is underwhelming. With its free entry and reliance presumably on microtransactions to keep the money flooding in, it's in Sony's interests to polish the game up so people keep playing, the one unexpected benefit of video games slowly sliding towards 'software as a service'.


Kill Strain is in a tricky position. When all the best examples of a genre have giant communities and are free-to-play, you need to give players a reason to opt for your game, and although this isn't awful by a long shot, there's just not enough here to warrant a recommendation. In the world of MOBA games, PC players are spoilt for choice and console players might be better served by Smite instead. Of course, Smite doesn't have the ability to overrun your enemies as a group of mutant juggernauts, does it?