Beyond Citadel

My first few minutes with Beyond Citadel had me fumbling a reload, getting shot, fumbling it again, and grinning the whole time. That tells you everything. This is a solo-developed 2.5D first-person shooter from Japanese developer doekuramori, a sequel to their 2020 cult FPS The Citadel, and it opens in January 2025 carrying more handcraft per pixel than most releases twice its size. You play as the Martyr, last weapon of the Seven Angels, punching through a fallen mechanical fortress to overthrow the Trumpeters of the Apocalypse and unravel what is sleeping beneath the rubble. You do not need to have played the first game. The world catches you up quietly, in fragments, through NPC scraps and loading-screen text that trusts you to piece it together. The thing that sets Beyond Citadel apart from the boomer-shooter crowd is its gunplay system, and it deserves real attention. Weapons degrade as you fire them, developing jams that require you to physically clear the stuck round while enemies are actively trying to end you. Reloads are not a single button press. Each firearm has its own sequence, whether that is slapping in a fresh magazine and chambering a round, or thumbing shells into a shotgun one at a time. The over two dozen weapons in the arsenal each handle distinctly, and the developer draws explicitly from Marathon and the LucasArts shooter Outlaws rather than the Doom run-and-gun tradition. The result is slower, more deliberate, and more methodical than the genre norm. Rounds are also projectile-based rather than hitscan, which adds a subtle but real weight to every exchange. Stack on top of that a hunger meter, a blood-oxygen level to monitor, blood packs that push health beyond the food-meter ceiling at the cost of time-decay, and a mobility kit of double-jumps, air-dashes, and corner-peeks, and you have a combat loop that demands genuine attention. The aesthetic deserves its own paragraph. The biomechanical-cyberpunk world draws from H.R. Giger and Ghost in the Shell simultaneously, and the 2.5D sprite work inside Unreal Engine 4 produces something that feels genuinely singular. Composer Mothman47, who came to the project as a fan before being brought on officially, gives the soundtrack a haunting, industrial quality that sits in your head after you close the game. The tone is brutal and bleak and occasionally surreal in ways that feel intentional rather than accidental. Be aware this is a mature-rated game in the fullest sense: graphic violence, gore, and sexual content are present throughout, though gore can be tuned down in settings. The game does not hide what it is, and players who need that kind of content kept at a distance should know upfront. The rough patches are real. Level cohesion suffers across the near-forty stages. You will swing from tight corridor skirmishes to wide-open sniper duels to city-spanning mech segments, and the transitions can feel whiplash-sudden rather than designed. Some sections lack clear direction, and occasional platforming stretches test patience more than skill. The narrative, delivered mostly through sparse NPC dialogue and loading tips, has translation inconsistencies that blur character moments in ways a cleaner localization would have fixed. Enemy variety thins out over the back half. These are the honest costs of a solo development scope this ambitious. But here is the thing about Beyond Citadel that keeps pulling me back to it: the gunplay is genuinely special. When the weapon handling clicks, when you are clearing a jam mid-firefight and pulling a fresh mag while a squad of post-apocalyptic soldiers closes in, there is a tactile thrill that most shooters, indie or otherwise, simply do not deliver. The community landed on "overwhelmingly positive" for a reason, and the soul of a single developer who cared deeply about every reload animation is visible in every level. If you have even mild interest in boomer shooters or retro FPS design and can meet the game on its own provocative, handcrafted terms, this one is worth your time. Kai, Scout Team