Games worth discovering

An ’80s-inspired roguelike deckbuilder with some groovy tunes - Should you play Nitro Kid?

22K View2022-10-21

Ever wondered what would happen if Bruce Lee and Mike Tyson partnered up to kick ass and save kids from the hands of an evil, money-grubbing corporation? No? Me neither, but it does sound like it’d be a really great movie...or game! That’s Nitro Kid for you, a game featuring characters clearly inspired by those icons set in the retro ’80s that merges roguelike deckbuilding and grid-based combat into an invigorating, perplexing gameplay experience.

THE STORY

Nitro Kid conveys its narrative through bite-sized bits of dialogue across each level, but that story mostly serves as the setting for the game. In Nitro Kid, you play one of three characters: L33 (inspired by Bruce Lee), J4X (inspired by Mike Tyson), or K31 (seemingly a mix of Sigourney Weaver from Alien and Linda Hamilton from Terminator). These three are tasked with saving children who have been kidnapped and forced into experimentation by an evil, greedy conglomerate called Infinity Megacorp. To rescue the kids, you’ll need to defeat squads of Infinity Megacorp’s hired goons.

PLATFORMS

Nitro Kid is available on PC but no other platforms at the moment. It’s worth noting that the game runs comfortably on lower-end PC specs.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve spent roughly five hours playing Nitro Kid, both in small chunks and a couple of longer sessions. It took me an hour to defeat the first boss in Nitro Kid, but beating the second boss was much more difficult. I'm still trying to make it past the second stage and complete the game.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Combat. Nitro Kid’s combat system feels like it’s constantly throwing new experiences at the player. The cards in your deck have a major impact on your playstyle, as do the character upgrades that you make as you progress. The game also forced me to pay careful attention to many elements, such as my movement around the battlefield, my energy consumption when placing cards, and even just my health bar. The challenges of navigating Nitro Kid’s combat scenarios left me mentally exhausted but always entertained.

• The aesthetic. Since Nitro Kid’s narrative is set in the ’80s, a lot of the visual design for characters, enemies, and levels share a neon retro pixel art style, which I found to be quite beautiful and captivating. The game’s background music also did a splendid job of immersing me and holding my attention. At more than one point while playing, I caught myself unconsciously starting to groove to the upbeat tunes of this game’s excellent soundtrack.

WHAT SUCKS

• Difficulty balance. Each of Nitro Kid’s playable characters is limited to a series of exclusive cards that are picked up during a run to build your deck. One character might have cards benefitting close-range combat, while another exclusively focuses on long-range abilities. However, of the three characters, only J4X’s base set of cards felt powerful enough to get me through the game’s most difficult bosses. No matter how I played the other two, arriving at the first boss level always felt like hitting a wall, and I wasn’t able to progress past that point with them.

• Frustrating UI design. Nitro Kid makes one very annoying mistake with the design of its level select screen: a lack of confirmation buttons. Yes, the standard “Are you sure?” pop-ups can be a nuisance, but in this game, once I selected a level—whether it was the shop or an enemy encounter—it started immediately with no option to back out. I was forced to face whatever level I accidentally clicked on, whether it was an elite enemy I wasn’t prepared for, or a shop I wanted to visit later when I had more cash. Hopefully this oversight can be fixed in a patch eventually.

SHOULD YOU PLAY IT?

Yes, you should definitely play Nitro Kid. While it has room for improvement, this is a fantastic roguelike and an even better deckbuilder. There’s so much to discover while playing, and the game has yet to fail at providing new experiences each and every time I’ve started a new run. And the music is pretty sick too.

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