Katanaut opens on a distant space station. You play as Naut, a skilled sword-wielding warrior sent to the station to investigate it. Immediately after you and your crew set foot on the station, you discover it's been infested by horrifying mutant creatures spawned from a sinister void. Even worse, you're stuck on the station until you can figure out what caused it. Now you must hack, slash and brutalize your way through the seemingly endless monsters to find a way out of hell.

Katanaut owes a lot to Dead Cells, and the basic structure of the game is almost identical. You go through multiple biomes of a decaying monster-filled hellscape, collecting resources and finding random items. You pause occasionally to fight bosses, and each death brings you back to the start for a new run. Hopping into the game felt quite familiar, and I found a number of the tactics I used in Dead Cells transferred over almost perfectly. However, Katanaut does have some of its own flavor, for good and ill.

At the start of every run, you select a katana to wield as your primary run. Each katana has its own distinct gimmicks that impact how you play the game. For example, your starting katana is relatively weak but slashes through enemies you hit, allowing you to use it as a combination attack and defense. The second one you'll get is less mobile but allows you to parry attacks. Later ones might have weaker physical damage but scatter magical aether particles when you hit, or it can switch between flame and lightning damage types. You can't swap katanas on a run, so it's important to select the best one.

Your secondary weapon is your gun, and unlike your katana, your gun is what swaps as you progress through the game. While you can unlock the ability to begin with a randomized weapon, you'll end up finding more guns as you progress through the game's levels. The gun variety includes pistols, shotguns, railguns and death beams. To use these weapons, you need to use ammo, which is a limited resource that you can upgrade. Different weapons take different amounts of ammo. A pistol might take one unit of ammo, a Gatling gun can fire multiple shots for one unit of ammo, or a powerful rocket launcher can take multiple units. Some melee weapons even require ammo. (Why a crowbar needs ammo to swing is a mystery for the dark gods.) Ammo is replenished by hitting enemies with your melee attack, encouraging you to regularly swap between the two attack types.

You're also able to carry up to two special skills or items at any given time. These skills can be activated upon cooldown and range from shooting fireballs to slowing time to giving your dodge roll the ability to damage enemies. Most of these are active skills, while some of them are passive bonuses. Picking a good skill to go with your chosen katana is important. It's functionally worthless to grab the ability to dash-slash through a foe if your katana already does it, but adding the ability to slow time makes your parry far stronger.

As in Dead Cells, a major factor in the game is gradually building up your resources and available skills. Instead of the three colored upgrades you find in that game, you instead find syringes that offer a handful of randomly chosen benefits. This includes upgrades to one of the game's three damage types (Aether, Combat or Kinetic), critical chance, loot drop rate, and ammo for ranged weapons. You also can find higher ranks of weapons and skills to reduce their cooldown or increase their effects.

I don't think this system works well, but Dead Cells also struggled with it. I appreciate having alternate choices for upgrades, but it was rarely (if ever) necessary. It was easy to select a specific type and pick that type again the next time. Holding one extra ammo didn't offer any benefits versus doing more damage and gaining more stamina, so despite the extra options, I gravitated toward the same choices I would've made in Dead Cells. Likewise, the ability to constantly upgrade weapons and skills meant I rarely wanted to experiment with something better because it would mean giving up some mythic-quality pistol to have a gray-quality railgun, and the damage loss from that was significant enough to not bother.

Katanaut's biggest flaw is the lack of variety. Once you've selected your melee weapon near the start of the run, that basically determines the only ways that the gameplay switches up. Yes, you can unlock different ranged weapons, but they don't feel very different. Most of them are just different flavors of damage. It's difficult not to make a direct comparison to Dead Cells, where every weapon has a distinct feel and different gimmicks you can build together. In Katanaut, most runs felt relatively similar, with the only difference being that I was shooting different guns between katana slashes.

It also doesn't help that there's a pretty significant power gap between different weapons. The weaker weapons in Dead Cells are still powerful but very situational, while the weakest weapons in Katanaut are practically worthless. I frequently gravitated to a small number of weapons. The skills absolutely have more variety, but even then, it's tough to turn down the ability to slow everything in the area by 80%, no matter what else is offered.

All of this sounds pretty negative, but I did have fun with Katanaut. The gameplay is fun, and there's a visceral satisfaction to slashing your way through the mutant-zombie hordes. It feels like it lacks the "one more run" addictive feeling that I got from Dead Cells, and by the time I'd finished the final boss and unlocked the game's harder challenge levels, I wasn't chomping at the bit for more. The harder modes do add a bit of spice to the game, though.

One area that I can't complain about is the visuals. Katanaut looks fantastic, with some gorgeously grotesque sprite work. Every enemy is memorably gross, the environments are packed with detail, and it just looked fantastic. Some of the objects can blend into the background a tad, but you're able to customize the luminosity of different parts of the environment, so you can make enemies or items "pop" more. The soundtrack is perfectly fine but doesn't really stand out much, with the music doing its job to provide a backdrop to the sounds of dying monsters.

Katanaut is a perfectly fun but ultimately rather forgettable Dead Cells-style title. It's perfectly competent at what it sets out to do, and the strong presentation goes a long way, but at the end of the day, it doesn't manage to carve out its own identity. It's absolutely worth a shot if you're burned out on similar games, but don't expect quite as much replay value.

Score: 7.5/10