Killer Bean is a roguelike third-person shooter based on the popular internet series. Learn more about the game’s plot, gameplay, release date, our review of the game, and more.
Everything We Know About Killer Bean
Killer Bean Plot
Killer Bean’s plot takes place after the film Killer Bean Forever, where the titular main character gets betrayed by the Shadow Agency and vows to destroy them for good. In the new game, Killer Bean fights to dismantle the Shadow Agency once and for all, with the game’s procedurally generated levels and encounters shifting the events of the narrative throughout every single playthrough.
Killer Bean Release Date
Killer Bean has been released in Early Access on July 8, 2026 for Steam, with PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 releases being planned after the Early Access period ends.
Killer Bean Review (Early Access) | So Bean It’s Good
The Game Fans Have Bean Waiting For
Killer Bean, as a series, is lovably stupid. It has amassed its cult following of internet memelords and action aficionados by executing upon its ridiculous premise perfectly, most notably in the "so bad its good" feature-length film Killer Bean Forever. A high stakes, ultra-violent action drama where breakdancing coffee beans shoot each other senselessly is the stuff of fever dreams, and it’s not a particularly good film by a reasonable metric, but its relentless fun factor keeps it an entertainingly dumb watch throughout.
In this regard, the open-world new roguelite shooter Killer Bean carries over its parent series’ ethos beautifully. I’m a relative newcomer to the series, but even I could spot the roots from where these coffee beans sprouted a mile away. Killer Bean revels in its absurd, John Woo style violence and action, with backflips, breakdancing, and slow-mo gun-fu taking center stage in its combat and gameplay.
It's a fun time for sure, with Killer Bean himself having an in-depth and ludicrous moveset that surprisingly blends together well. He has everything from multiple guns, a slow-mo free fall ability, an AoE breakdance ability, and even a suplex finisher that was absolutely hilarious to land. This moveset was fluid and dynamic and it made the main combat loop mostly fun, even when it was starting to get repetitive.
While the lack of depth or complexity would normally be a flaw with the game’s combat, the over-the-top simplicity is very much the point. That being said, for something to be "so bad it's good" it has to be, well, bad by reasonable standards of quality.
On the surface, Killer Bean is the perfect adaptation of the source material because it's so ridiculously bad and unfinished that the flaws become ironic moments of fun and wonder. Peeling back the shells, however, reveals that these flaws are also the massive pitfalls where Killer Bean becomes an uninteresting, and even frustrating mess. It’s a friction which lies at the heart of the game’s biggest problem: a mismatch between ethos and ambition, and in this sense Killer Bean lacks the coherent, sharp vision that made its predecessor a cult classic.
For all its dumb fun grandstanding, Killer Bean is an acquired taste. Players wanting a dumb, fun shooting game will be bogged down by the roguelite systems and shifting mission objectives, while those who want a challenging experience will be disappointed by what little substance is actually there. This one is firmly for the fans of the series, as I can’t imagine what would draw a newcomer to this game apart from its sheer absurdity.
The critical problems with Killer Bean completely hamper the entire experience beyond its initial, accidental fun factor. The roguelite progression system takes a backseat to the less interesting procedurally generated worlds, feeling like an afterthought that hasn’t been quite fleshed out yet. Common, gamebreaking glitches, boring visuals, and horrific controls, meanwhile, indicate a lack of polish or cohesive vision that ultimately keeps the game from being an engaging or rewarding experience.
It should be noted, though, that as an Early Access title, most of Killer Bean’s issues are par for the course and understandable. It's a particularly difficult title to assess objectively, not only because of the "so-bad-its-good" meme status that the series holds but also because of how its many issues can be tied back to its ambitious, single-person led development cycle. Regardless, these problems still hold Killer Bean back quite significantly and are worth pointing out in the service of seeing the game improve.
A World That's Searing in Intensity, but Lacking in Flavor
As a continuation of Killer Bean Forever, this new game maintains its predecessor’s lore and worldbuilding to a tee, with its many factions and criminal organizations present and accounted for. The Shadow Agency are the main, big bads of the story, but the Mercenaries and Bad Beans also appear in combat from time to time.
These factions function well as indisputably evil cannon fodder to mindlessly gun down and suplex into oblivion. None of the moral quandaries you might have about committing mass video game murder will be in question here; you’re simply a good (?) guy trying to take down corrupt mercenaries and evil sociopaths from taking over the world.
Thanks to its simplicity, Killer Bean’s power fantasy translates surprisingly well into the video game format. Gunning down enemy beans in the most ridiculous ways is, at least, dumb, entertaining fun, especially given the sheer number of (albeit nonthreatening) enemy encounters present in the game. This combat is ultimately brought down by not offering any depth, variety, or challenge, but it's at least flashy enough to capture the absurd, gratuitous violence of the series.
One of my personal favorite combat sequences was suplexing a Mercenary off a cliff into the sea, then proceeding to leap forward in slow-mo to shoot at a few more Shadow Agents before blowing up a gas tank to kill even more nameless beans. I had a big, dumb grin on my face the entire time, with Killer Bean’s cheesy one-liners and enemy bosses’ stupid catchphrases only making the experience more hilarious.
This simplicity was at its best, weirdly enough, in the arcade-style speedrun "The Party" game mode. This separate game mode sees Killer Bean infiltrating increasingly hostile parties, reminiscent of the opening of Killer Bean Forever, and taking everybody in the room out. They’re simple, fun and let the game’s gunplay shine brightly. Even better, this game mode actually lets me relate to Killer Bean here, since I’d also hate for rambunctious parties to keep droning on as I try to fall asleep.
This, however, also shows where the game falters. This type of gratuitous, over-the-top violence and cheesiness is fun, but without any real complexity or even variety anchoring it it just gets grating after a while. This is only made worse by the world that Killer Bean and his many nameless foes live in, which is boring and underdeveloped.
One of Killer Bean’s main gameplay draws is its ever-shifting world, with procedurally generated maps dictating the narrative’s overall flow and progression. It’s a shame, then, that this world looks and feels empty, with nothing really differentiating each area apart from a distinct, generic theme.
Killer Bean’s world is full of talking coffee beans, warring criminal factions, and honest-to-god mechs, but somehow this absurdity isn’t reflected in the game’s setting at all. It's neither mundane enough to be familiar or interesting enough to make the violence of its inhabitants feel impactful or important, and it ends up feeling like nothing at all.
A Killer Gameplay Structure Thats Bean Done Better
Killer Bean’s overall gameplay and meta-progression is, for the most part, superfluous. Yes, it’s ridiculously fun and hilarious most of the time, and the game is meant to reflect the series’ over-the-top stupidity. There is, however, a striking dissonance between this unapologetic, gratuitously mindless violence and the desire to be a straightforward roguelite, and the latter gets the short end of the stick in this regard.
The game’s roguelite structure feels inconsequential, barely affecting the overall flow of gameplay and progression at all. Enemies don’t really scale in difficulty regardless of any existing upgrades or weapon mods, which themselves don’t affect combat outside of extremely niche scenarios.
From my first complete run, it seems clearer to me that the starting loadout is more than enough to beat the whole game. Yes, I love Killer Bean’s golden-plated dual pistols, a classic piece of action movie iconography that my favorite film Face/Off also uses to great effect. However, having them be so strong that they’d be allowed to have infinite ammo feels ridiculously counterintuitive to the feeling of progression that roguelites thrive off.
With this, the point of making Killer Bean a roguelite remains more and more unclear. Bosses aren’t particularly difficult either, and when specific combat scenarios required special weapons like RPGs it was only a matter of finding the weapon throughout the map instead of rewarding players for sufficiently preparing proper loadouts.
Thankfully, the moment-to-moment gameplay still remains fun and engaging despite its simplicity, and this is where the decision to make the game a roguelite makes the most sense. Most missions are composed of Killer Bean infiltrating an area to hack into computers to find out the mission objectives for the level, which are usually conveyed to him by retired mercenary Grant.
Mission objectives vary differently depending on the level, which themselves can change and differ per run. Unlike the overall progression, which felt meaningless, the shifting, unpredictable mission objectives per run kept the game at least somewhat engaging and fresh throughout, even when it rarely elevated the gameplay past its glaring flaws.
What really doesn’t work though are the different vehicle options Killer Bean has, which all genuinely feel horrible to control. While Killer Bean’s signature convertible is manageable on the road, it still lacks the weight or responsiveness that something this sleek and badass should have. It certainly beats sprinting, but it's barely present in any of the levels to begin with.
What really kills it is the mission where you have to climb aboard a mech on the sea, driving a jetski towards your objective. The jetski clashes with the water physics in such a strange and disorienting way, while controlling the damn thing is absolutely nonsensical as directional turns never remain consistent. It was one of my biggest pain points with the game, and I am hoping that such a major roadblock for progression gets improved after certain updates.
Right Now, Killer Bean is Under-Extracted
Unfortunately, Killer Bean is currently plagued by a plethora of glitches and issues that genuinely hurt the overall experience. Killer Bean and his foes will clip out of the world sometimes, animations will get stuck and certain progression points can even get locked out for seemingly no reason at all.
These glitches aren’t hard to come by at all, either. That suplex move I kept raving about somehow led me to slamming a Mercenary so hard we both fell through the floor and remained falling until I restarted the level. In another unfortunate glitch, activating the Bullet Trick ability forced a first-person perspective that, somehow, made Killer Bean stop moving entirely. I don’t even think Bullet Trick worked properly once during my entire playthrough.
Thankfully, these glitches seem to be getting addressed rather quickly, with a few hotfixes already being released as I’ve been writing this review. Most notably, black screen freezes and problems with the audio settings have been patched out, and this level of immediacy for the game ultimately bodes well for its future.
As of right now, though, there is a lack of overall polish that permeates throughout the game, even looking past its glitches. Visually, the game’s low draw distance, weirdly textured character models, and barebones UI still makes it feel unpolished and not very fun to look at, while the game’s generic rock and electronic tracks loop in and out weirdly and at random. Aesthetically, the game is bland and uninteresting, with even all the bean enemies blending into each other after a few hours.
This, ultimately, shouldn’t be taken as too much of a knock against Killer Bean. The game is still in Early Access and is largely the product of a single person, and with at least two years of active development before its full release this is essentially a paid beta-test version. Even then, technical polish aside, the real problem with the game all boils down to its lack of a coherent, contained vision.
The Dangers of Being a One Man Army
Doing everything yourself isn’t nearly as easy as Killer Bean’s effortless trek throughout Beantown’s criminal underground makes it seem. While Killer Bean creator Jeff Lew has at least successfully translated his singular vision into Killer Bean Forever, this game seems to be showing the limits of that absolute, untethered creative freedom.
While Killer Bean functions best as a dumb timewaster, the ambition on display here clearly eclipses and negatively affects everything the game wants to offer. Killer Bean wants to be multiple things, all at once: an open-world title, a roguelite, a third person shooter, an arcade shooter, a multiplayer title, and even a driving game. All of this is tied to being a direct continuation of a pretty narratively stupid film, but even that gets caught up in its 10 possible storylines (all of which make very little sense).
In that sense, this feels like a case of ambition betraying ethos. For a strange but apt comparison, this game is the equivalent of mushing together differently colored blocks of modelling clay with so little forethought that it becomes an indistinguishable, brown mush. All of these elements of the game just aren’t meshed together in a meaningful and interesting way, leading to the experience being incredibly messy. In a weird way, trying too hard to be a complex, overarching experience is where Killer Bean ultimately fails as an adaptation of what makes the series so beloved in the first place.
Killer Bean does not execute any of its grand ideas with much coherence or intentionality, except for maybe the combat. Even that aspect of the game, as stupidly fun as it can be, still tries too hard to convey a sense of complexity by giving players different weapon options and mods which, at the end of the day, barely change the gameplay at all.
I can’t help but appreciate it when creators want to aim higher in bringing their uncompromised vision to life, especially when their work is already so entrenched in low-brow absurdist irony. Usually, it results in some of my favorite art ever created, both in gaming and just in general. Ambition is only as good as its execution, though, and through this Killer Bean’s poorly implemented ideas greatly bring down the hilarious core premise.
That being said, the immediacy of the updates and Lew’s responsiveness to the different glitches do in fact bode well for the future of the game. With 2 years in Early Access (and hopefully an actual staff to help Jeff with the game), Killer Bean could very well achieve its grand vision of being a fully fleshed out open-world roguelite, and at its core there are some good ideas worth expanding upon. As of right now, though, it's not a particularly engaging time outside of fulfilling the fantasy of being Killer Bean.
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Killer Bean Product Information
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| Title | KILLER BEAN |
|---|---|
| Release Date | July 8, 2026 |
| Developer | Killer Bean Studios LLC |
| Publisher | Killer Bean Studios LLC |
| Supported Platforms | Steam |
| Genre | Roguelite, Third Person Shooter, Open World |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | N/A |
| Official Website | Killer Bean Official Website |
