Killer Bean Preview

I, the author of these lines, kill the boss — and get thrown straight back to the start screen. No credits, no final cutscene, just the main menu. I sit there and realize I've completed the entire Early Access campaign in two hours. And thank God I wasn't spending my own money on this, because I have never played such a shoddy piece of work in my life.

It all started with me sitting there completely baffled by what was happening. I launch the game, it's in English, the beans are moving their mouths, text is appearing — and there's absolutely no sound. Turns out all the volume sliders default to zero for some reason. The developers apparently released a patch for this, and I was playing the updated version, but the bug was still there. I had to manually drag all the sliders up myself. And even after that, in some scenes characters just silently open and close their mouths.

The core gameplay loop comes down to endless running. You run across a giant empty location. You run for a long time, finger cramping on Shift because you have to hold it down the whole way. You arrive at a waypoint, rescue some character, drag them back to the ship, and then walk all the way back to where you just came from. The question is: why? An absolutely pointless waste of time. If your soul is craving not empty running but a proper journey with atmosphere and interesting events, here's a TOP with 120 best adventure games on PC, PS5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.

The maps are enormous, and on them you just run up to monitor icons, press the interact key, wait for a progress bar to fill, and locations with guns or quest items unlock. The same thing everywhere: first in the city, then in a giant desert, then in a winter location. Winter, thankfully, wasn't as suffocating.

As for the visuals — the grass textures look like something out of Warcraft from the year 2000. And across that grass, mobs come running at you. They literally run right past you, stop with their backs turned, and pretend to search for a target. You walk right up to them — zero reaction. Until you shoot at them, they have no idea what's going on. There are only a couple of enemy types: other beans, robots, and drones.

The missions themselves raise questions too. "Capture the flag" just means you stand on a point and wait. Nobody attacks you, nothing happens. The one actually cool moment was when helicopters showed up. You had to find a rocket launcher and shoot them down. I naturally missed straight away and burned through the whole clip. But shooting at them was genuinely fun. Then three more helicopters arrived and the fun immediately turned into a chore.

The arsenal is frankly slim: guns come in regular and green by rarity. You mostly run around with pistols and some kind of automatic weapon or bazooka. The trailers seemed to show melee combat, but I never punched a single enemy the whole time.

There are abilities though! Press Two and your bean launches into a wild breakdance, firing in all directions. This is a full-on built-in cheat code. It destroys everything alive around you and seems to grant invincibility. I pretty much spammed this dance for the entire game. The gauge that powers it fills up from landing hits, and mine never ran dry.

The other buttons behave strangely. On F you lunge forward with your bean belly. I didn't see it deal any damage and kept getting flung off to the side. One is pure mystery: the camera zooms in and you have to time it so an enemy shoots at you, you shoot back, the bullets collide, and the ricochet kills a third enemy. I only figured out how it works near the very end of the campaign. If this kind of gameplay leaves you craving actually powerful gunfights, here's a best first-person shooters: Top FPS games on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox, and Switch.

There were three bosses in the whole game. I died exactly once, even though I chose high difficulty at the start — difficulty affects the number of lives. The bosses just stand there like mannequins and lob grenades at you. Only one was decent: the Bean on a Stick. He literally waved a stick in front of him, forced you to jump, and threw things you had to dodge.

Near the end I was thrown onto a jet ski. The controls are simply awful. I made it to a huge mechanical robot standing in the water. A mini-platforming section followed: while climbing up the metal structure I lost all sense of direction in space. Inside I activated a dome, beat back three waves of enemies with my beloved breakdance, and headed up to the final boss.

Between missions you can drop into a shop. You buy guns or upgrade your health with money, discs, and some kind of eggs. The game never explained where to get the eggs. Discs never dropped for me either. Maybe because it's Early Access and the economy will get tuned eventually? In the end I just bought everything with regular money.

Out of curiosity I poked around the other modes. In The Party, beans are hanging out and you kill them, smash the DJ booth, and the level ends. In Battle Arena, mobs spawn in waves — kill twenty, here comes the next batch, no timer. In Conquest you capture flags for the red team. I racked up three thousand points, lazily fending off three stragglers, got bored, and quit — deadly dull. If you just want something to play without spending anything, here's the best free PC games.

Oh, there's also a double jump. Jumping is fun. That is genuinely the only objective positive in the entire game. And the framerate held at around 120, though it occasionally dipped to 70 while running.

What we have here is a game many people genuinely looked forward to, but in practice it delivers nothing but disappointment. For two hours I forced myself to keep running forward across empty maps, desperately waiting for it to be over. On the plus side: stable FPS and a decent double jump. For a modern release, even in Early Access, that is critically little. But if you do not have the most powerful PC, there's always something worthwhile to find in the best games for low-end PCs and laptops.