This is my video game review of
Shovel Knight for the Nintendo Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, and Microsoft Windows. My review for this game is bittersweet, so don't hate me for trashing it through most of the review. Also, this review contains ***SPOILARS***. You, my friend, have been warned. Let's start.
About time I jumped on the bandwagon for this one. I know the market is saturated with 8-bit games trying to cash in on the nostalgia factor, but this one does it very well.
And by that, I mean it takes all the fun stuff from the likes of old
Castlevania and
Mega Man games, and leaves out many of the questionable design elements that lesser developers would just assume are part of the experience, or confuse with legitimate difficulty. This is not to say its inspirations are necessarily bad games, but what this does with them is distill them to the point where, if classic 8-bit titles were urine and Yacht Club were a filtration system, you would never know you were pulling a Bear Grylls. Never once did I feel like a death was not my fault or could've been prevented if the game had telegraphed properly (okay, maybe once or twice in Propeller Man's stage). You're familiar with
EgoRaptor's Sequelitis episode covering Mega Man X? If not, go Google that real quick. I'll wait. ... I'm operating under the assumption that you didn't actually Google it. Suffice it to say that what EgoRaptor loves about
Mega Man X is that it teaches you to play the game as it goes, but without ever pressuring you to learn something without the reasonable expectation that you could teach yourself from the context.
Shovel Knight excels at this. It paces itself so that you learn the game's mechanics in a controlled environment so that by the time you're expected to Shovel Pogo across a bottomless insta-kill pit, for instance, it's completely intuitive. Is this hand-holding? Well, I never felt like it. Instead, I felt like I was
figuring out every room as I went, because I grew to expect that that room would build on the ones before. Even when I found myself dying more than once to an obstacle, frequent checkpoints made iteration time low enough that it never felt like a chore to continue. More games should do this instead of tossing the player in a completely hostile trial-and-error environment simply because older games used that as a substitute for expending some effort to balance the curve. Admittedly, some of this was a holdout from when you actually spent a quarter every time you wanted another Trial to correct the Error. But I think it's high time developers learn the difference between the good difficulty, the bad difficulty, and the ugly tedium. The latter two run rampant in games, especially ones made to evoke the NES era.
But the game's good balance isn't its only recommending feature. Character sprites are full of personality. The levels are varied and have gimmicks, but ones that integrate well with existing controls rather than being jarring. Secrets abound and are perhaps a little obvious, but in my book, that's better than making them so obscure that no player without a guide or an itchy trigger finger could find them - instead, you discover them just by keeping your eyes open. Optional and bonus content fills out the overworld map beyond the eight
Robot Master Order of No Quarter stages. Boss fights all heighten the game's pulse like they should.
Castlevania-style sub-weapons give you a plethora of offensive and mobility options (and unlike the game that inspired their inclusion, most or all of them are actually somewhat useful), making speedrunning viable for the purposes of replay value (if that's your jam).
Speaking of jams, the music is just as expressive in its love letter to the best of 8-bit video games as any other element of
Shovel Knight. It can hold its own with the best of the "Wily Castle Stage 1-2"s and "The Moon"s. Like, seriously.
It's on Bandcamp on a name-your-price basis. Give 'er a listen. Memorable soundtracks are increasingly rare in modern games, don't ignore this one. This also reminds me that there are in-game sheet music collectibles that unlock the option to play the tracks once you've found the music for them, and it's amazing how much fun it is to track down the sound test.
Even though the plot is as excuse-y as its counterparts in NES titles everywhere, the presentation is still fun. It's shameless about the tropes it employs that remind the player of older games.
It feels like something you played as a kid. Things like "Order of No Quarter." It's shameless. Nothing terribly groundbreaking (heh), sure (many nostalgia-based games get the tone of the classics right even if they fail at everything else), but I was entertained and occasionally caught just a little off-guard by some of the NPCs, in the best possible way.
But really, everything this game does seems to be done in the best possible way. There's good reason for its long incubation period, and it was well worth it. Other would-be retraux designers take note: bringing the fun of classic platformers does not necessitate resurrecting the evil undead fake difficulty and frustrating design choices that often accompanied them. Leave the unfun elements buried, and dig up the things that players actually enjoy.
I give this game a 3 out of 10.
Show Posts
