Killer Queen Black, a strategic eight-player action platformer from Liquid Bit and BumbleBear Games, has been announced for Switch and PC in the first period of 2019. Introducing itself as in an arcade form back in 2013, the game is all about bees, 80s metal songs and a carefully crafted art style.
The game was announced during the Nintendo E3 2018 showcase as a comeback from the original Killer Queen created by Nik Mikros and Joshua DeBonis, who are also working on this new edition and spent a long time tweaking the experience for home play.
If you’re wondering how the gameplay works (so do I), two teams of 4 players each fight against each other for their hive, one takes the role of the Queen while the others play as drones. Each Queen starts with armed with a stinger, but it has a trade-off in limiting her lives.
Drones take a whole different role, focusing on the strategic aspect of the game. There are gates on the map that turn them into warriors with flight capabilities in exchange of berries. Each gate can gran different weapons and upgrades, but the Queen can turn these exclusively for their team only by flying over them.
Also, there are three types of victories: by delivering the highest amount of berries back to a base in the shortest time possible, riding a snail on the bottom of the screen into a goal post (yes, for real) or killing the adversary’s Queen three times.
Killer Queen Black offers four game types: Quick Matches, Ranked, Custom games with adjustable rule sets and Arena, which requires a ticket to enter (earned through victory or purchased via in-game currency) and tasks players with going for victory streaks to earn rewards. A notch is added to players’ swords for every victory, and reaching 100 earns them a unique sword to be the coolest bee in the hive. Liquid Bit plans an ongoing support of the game by releasing additional maps after the game’s release.
The insane multiplayer Killer Queen Black will be available digitally sometime Early 2019. Make sure to visit the official site for more information, and don’t forget to follow the devs on Twitter.