Butcher

Rip and tear!

Last year's fantastic DOOM reboot nailed the energy and relentless forward motion of id Software's industry defining FPS, stripping out any sort of meaningful narrative in favour of a lighting-fast funhouse ride. Yet where DOOM 2016 gave old fashioned mayhem a shiny new coat of paint, Transhuman Design’s BUTCHER keeps the industrial aesthetic and audio design of 90s shooters and transposes it into a punishing and addictive 2D platformer.

Butcher is an ultra-violent 2D sidescroller that prides itself in its hard difficulty. However, does the unforgiving gameplay make for a fun or frustrating experience?

Butcher is a grotesque love-letter to older shooters with addictive gameplay, plenty of different difficulty settings and disturbing imagery. However, it doesn’t have enough to offer as the content falls short leading to an incredibly unsatisfying conclusion.

To be frank, Butcher is a game that’s best enjoyed in small doses. This grim, pixellated gorefest successfully channels the spirit of 8 and 16 bit shoot-’em-ups but doesn’t stand up to sustained play; spend too long with it in one sitting and it starts feeling like an infuriating grind. Yet dip into it a level or two at a time – the earlier levels in particular – and you’ve got yourself an enjoyable, fast paced chunk of old-school shoot-em-up action. Butcher isn’t the best at what it does, but if you’re prepared to ration your time with it, it’s worth a look.

Not much to look at, Butcher is an enjoyable slice of old-fashioned, gratuitously bloody and OTT side-scrolling bullet hell that's worth a pop, if that sounds like your cup of tea. Sorry. Your cup of blood.

Butcher is a game that will mainly appeal to those who like hardcore shooters, where one wrong move can cost you progress. For others, that style of play could prove frustrating, especially when testing your platforming skills. Though it’s built around the idea of being a relentless killing machine, that doesn’t really feel fully realised with most enemies on a par with you when it comes to dealing damage. Butcher shows potential, but it doesn’t reach it in its short campaign.

Defeating levels on Casual mode is a piece of cake, but the only one boss you get to encounter is difficult to defeat even if it’s set to the easiest mode the game has to offer. When you set the difficulty to Hard (even if it’s considered as the Normal difficulty), it might be a bit intricate in the first few levels, but the difficulty gradually changes when you progress further – it gets harder. The boss fight on Hard is almost impossible to beat. Butcher can frustrate you at some point where you just scratch your head, and think ‘how the hell can I beat this level?’ And if you’re brave enoug...