Genre: Arcade
Developer: Liquid Bit, LLC
Publisher: Liquid Bit, LLC

Zoomed in close, and Killer Queen Black's character sprites have that unpleasant odor of a testosterone-challenged, neck-bearded hipster in bad need of a bath. Thankfully though, the game's goings-ons are scaled out, putting more of an emphasis on the solid stage and background art than the pretentious characters. This "Hi-Bit" style is pleasant almost no matter where it's done, even if it does nothing interesting technologically.

Being a straight-up arcade game, this is one of those titles which has a single theme song, and where excerpts from that song are used for game events such as the conclusion of a round. Almost incredibly given the dismal state of modern-day video game music, the aforementioned theme here is an instrumental power metal song! The game's sound effects are fine in isolation, but don't do enough to consistently serve mechanical purposes during play.

Killer Queen Black is a four-on-four single-screen arcade game, played vaguely like a "Super Smash Bros."-lite, with a dash of "Joust". Players may fluidly shift between attempting to win the match via different means, such as collecting berries or riding a snail across the board. With human players, there are a lot of tactical possibilities, and the team's strategies frequently shift during play. Unlike the arcade game, this home conversion if four-on-four, and has a dedicated attack button to help out the game's network code.

Since arcades virtually died off in the 90s, the experience of buying a home conversion of something first experienced in said arcades is one unknown to an entire generation of hobbyists. And yet, this Switch adaptation of Killer Queen Black serves just that purpose-- and it's an "arcade perfect" rendition of course, given the game's low technical sophistication, and modern-day shared APIs and middleware. As a formula, it's something of a modern-day classic, resulting in non-stop hilarity, shouting, and trash talking between the teams. Highly recommended!