Beyond Citadel
Note: mature content ahead! Gore and lewd imagery.
Beyond Citadel is an FPS from 2025, it’s the sequel to The Citadel from 2020, which is a very similar game. I think the original should be played first, although you don’t miss out on too much by skipping to the sequel.
In general, Beyond Citadel is more cool, more fun, and has more stuff in it. The first game is worth a review too, but most of my descriptions or comments will apply to both. It’s kind of a package deal.
Porn
It’s hard to not address that this game is extremely gratuitous. There are no reservations about showing skin and flesh, and this is made clear from the start of the game. But the game is not strictly pornographic, there isn’t really anything about sex. No depictions or implications of sexual acts, no lore or themes that could relate to sex (unless you really twist it), and practically no visible sex organs. The developer is Japanese, so the game follows their obscenity laws, meaning a nippleless mannequin is okay. So this is the sort of extent that the explicit content reaches.
This wouldn’t be notable if the game wasn’t constantly excited to show more. Your character’s outfit is ridiculous, you can look down to see your boobs and thighs, and there’s lots of fanservice concept art that unlocks as you progress. So, the game is lewd, but it has this confidence and self-amusement about it.
(Gore) Porn
If the lewdness scared anyone off, there’s not much more they would like anyways. Beyond Citadel goes willingly into guro territory, with more enthusiasm than the sexy stuff. Real fetish pros will recognize they are one and the same, but I think this game plays a nice little trick for those who don’t know.
Most FPS games have gore, right? Every sick freak loves some Brutal Doom or Postal 2, but they never really went far enough. Just shock value, no appreciation for the organs and the disfigurement. Citadel takes that necessary step, and uses its sprite-based graphics to make every keyframe its own work of art. There is extreme attention to detail in every death animation, and further stages of disembowelment that extend past death. Is this porn? It’s in context of something that normally has gore, so why not add extra layers of detail?
(Gun) Porn
It’s funny I haven’t talked about the gameplay yet, but I want to establish a pattern. This gratuitous attention to detail also penetrates the gameplay, through the long hard cock of gun porn. Manually loading revolvers, racking slides, ejecting magazines, and clearing jams are all core interactions for the game’s 20+ weapons. Bullet drop is very real and you will have to lead your shots. And while lame loser baby games like Receiver 2 or Into The Radius make gameplay slow and realistic, Beyond Citadel is happy to throw you into some Doom 2 shit without warning.
I’m referring to gun porn here in the operation of guns: there’s this porn-like approach to making it fun. You’re jerking off to the idea of clearing a jam while under heavy fire, so the game sets you up for that, and doesn’t make it too much of a pain when that happens. It’s all smiles. Of course, the controls help too. Most guns work the same way, and you rarely have to look up which button to press. Using right mouse to pull the slide/hammer and clear jams made single action guns feel really nice. There’s a fiddly feeling to it, similar to operating real guns.
oh hey that’s two rocket launcher guys and one has already fired at me
Gameplay
So this is a 2.5D shooter, everything is a sprite that billboards at you. Playing a game like this made me realize how much better this is over 3D models. It’s always easier to shoot the flat side of a barn than a camouflaged coke bottle, and I only find the latter interesting in 1v1s. Beyond Citadel puts all gameplay emphasis on target priority, navigation, and weapon choice. Aiming isn’t useless, since enemies have weak points, and weapons handle range and bullet drop/spread differently. So it doesn’t just feel like Doom, despite having the base vibe.
The variety! I can’t even count how many enemy types there are in this game, it feels like there’s another 4 new enemies in each chapter. Great use of color and silhouette to make them distinct, and usually meaningful differences in attacks. This sort of thing can’t really work so easily in 3D, though Serious Sam does a pretty good job.
Level design
It’s easy to compare all 2.5D shooters to Doom, but Citadel sometimes feels even more limited than that. There’s lots of verticality, but the levels all feel a little quaint, consisting mostly of flat surfaces, and lots of right angles. The first Citadel game had a lot more indoor and abstract levels, but Beyond Citadel tries to create locations at times. There’s a lot of open spaces, which encourage sniping, along with interior mazes with doors. Great verticality too, moving from the ground floor to rooftops over the course of a level. Levels are on the larger side, sometimes taking over 30 minutes. My biggest gripe of the whole game is in a few levels, you need to collect 4 keys to unlock the exit. These keys were always spread out across the level, requiring me to backtrack a now empty level to find them. In a speedrun, I’m sure this could be interesting, but for first time play it’s just annoying. There are better ways to encourage exploration.
Pictured: me realizing I missed a key somewhere back there
Each level has two collectibles (not exactly secrets), usually hidden in clever places. I rarely had difficulty finding them, but I did miss a few. One of the collectibles is a piece of concept art, and the other is a stat point for the game’s unremarkable stat system. Which will not be remarked!
(Worldbuilding) Porn
Citadel’s setting is hard to describe, mostly because the game is not willing to describe it. I want to bring up the “porn” aspect a 4th time, but there isn’t a good word for it. But I know you’ve seen it before, in Evangelion and Bayonetta, and also kinda in Halo and Dead Space. It’s this hyper religious aesthetic that completely ignores theology or canon, and makes up its own thing just to look cool.
The world of The Citadel pulls vocabulary from Revelations to portray a post-apocalypse, one with machinery and incomprehensible technology. All the lore is communicated through fragmented poetry on loading screens, or vague references from NPCs.
I refer to this worldbuilding as a sort of porn because it doesn’t really help the story. It just looks really cool and it doesn’t have to have meaning beyond that. The fragmented storytelling doesn’t get in the way of the immediate plot; you know what you have to kill and you know that each level is taking you closer to that boss. Lore is always a type of flair, and Beyond Citadel understands this.
Probably the most straightforward lore explanation in-game
The sound design in this game ties everything together. All the atmosphere established by the lore and artstyle and gameplay, is reflected in the soundscape. Music and ambient noises accentuate the physical scope of the world. Enemies, each with their distinct alert sounds, movement sounds, attack sounds, let you know exactly how surrounded you are at all times. Each combat encounter trains you to learn to fiddle with your guns by ear. Popping heads are met with satisfying/disgusting death screams. Ejecting a spent round is met with the sound of it bouncing on the ground.
Then, after combat has ended, you have a moment of peace. After quickly reloading (click click click click) you start to hear the much fainter sound of your once-intact targets bleeding out. Helpless panting comes from the mess of organs on the ground, as they slowly drain to 0 HP. You can always speed up this process with a quick stomp to the skull. I will admit I had a lot of fun doing this, I must have about 3 hours of my 15 hour playtime just mashing kick on helpless dying women.
That’s a unique vibe, right? I can’t really name any other game that makes it so fun to do such horrible things. Beyond Citadel doesn’t really care about morals, presenting a world where typically moral creatures of faith commit terrible anti-human acts. It’s not supposed to be a happy story, but it is supposed to be a fun game. And it is a fun game, I think it’s incredible and extremely notable.
Beyond Citadel has been met with a surprisingly big popularity! It’s still sitting at around 1600 reviews on Steam (overwhelmingly positive!!) but there’s some traction on reviews that the first game never got. I’m glad others are deranged enough to appreciate this game as much as me, and if you’re in that camp I can’t recommend it enough.
That being said, my criticisms on the level design still stand, and there are a few other mechanics that don’t work very well. I was also running out of ammo near the end of the game, and ran out of money to buy more ammo, and almost got softlocked by a boss. That did force me to think on my feet, so maybe this was intended and improved my experience. Dammit I want to end this review already!
Score: 3/3, unless you’re a soft baby and can’t handle cool things.
Here’s some gameplay: https://pomf2.lain.la/f/myxkpulg.mp4
believe in urself