SHOVEL KNIGHT:
My first system was a Game Boy Color. On it, I inherited titles like Super Mario Land 1 and 2, and bought titles like Super Mario Deluxe, Wario Land 3, and Kirby's Tilt an Tumble. Before my Game Boy, I played games like Garfield: Caught in the Act! and Sonic 3 and Knuckles on the PC. These were my experiences with platformers as a child and they shaped much of my perception of platformers in the future. As I grew older, I loved titles like Kirby 64, New Super Mario Bros. (1), Mighty Switch Force, Mutant Mudds, and more recently, Scram Kitty and his Buddy on Rails.
I will preface this by saying, I played a game called Mega Man Extreme on the Game Boy Color when it was released, and I did not enjoy it. I have played many Mega Man titles and I have not enjoyed them. I hope that taints the rest of my review as a biased and jaded person.
I am not here to ruin Shovel Knight, I am here to defend my past experience as a gamer. Because, in backing Shovel Knight or enjoying it because it reminds you of your experiences as a gamer, you are doing the exact same thing.
I would like to think I took a few lessons from these titles:
-Aesthetic (or lack thereof) contributes greatly to the overall experience of a game.
-Gameplay and level flow are key in order to create an organic feel to the challenge.
-Set rules and restrictions to fundamental mechanics enhance challenge and a sense of progression
-Obstacles and enemies used in effective areas improve gameplay
-Boss encounters need structure
-Powerups need to feel substantial and mechanics must feel integral
Now, many would argue that Shovel Knight possesses many of these elements, but on many accounts, I disagree. This is because I believe that Shovel Knight is a game with a strong heart but half-realized ideas. It hits many notes, but they feel slightly off key.
Let's get another thing out of the way- Shovel Knight's soundtrack is a triumph and definitely worthy of praise.
Aesthetics in Shovel Knight are ill-defined. At times, the game strives to look as NES-ish as possible, with deformed sprites, choppy, isolated animation and stark visuals. But at others, mordern sprite design creeps in too heavily and environments look cluttered. Smaller characters feature large amounts of color and detail while larger ones use thicker lines that create a disparagy. Some environmental animation and decoration is simplistic while others are overly complex and beautiful works of art that seem out of place. Towns have an issue of very few characters possessing equal treatment in detail and complexity. While some may argue that not all characters need to be as complex as others, they feel instead like the work of several artists without a consistent level of quality when making more complex characters with lower detail meld more with pre-existing simplistic sprites or vice versa would lend the game a cleaner, more balanced look.
Levels have a very obvious sense of progression in mechanic but not in organic design. There a number of examples of open spaces in level design made to accommodate singular obstacles and enemies which doesn't feel economic in a game as small as Shovel Knight is, and the final few areas of the game throw progression out the window for a culmination of previous elements or to build a sense of dramatic tension which is something absent in the rest of the experience. This mish-mash of design choices feels organized based on the progression of the game's "story" but not the key qualities of an action platformer.
Shovel Knight's upgrade system is lovely for those who want to make the game easier for themselves, but it also takes away from the core idea of an action platformer. Other titles perform the idea with ease- a challenge is put forth with a limitation on the player in terms of moveset, health, or other mechanics, but they must adjust to the game's deliberate choices and direction in order to overcome said challenge. Shovel Knight relies heavily on Ducktales-like bouncing segments and more bottomless pits in order to balance out the difficulty later, with the second to last boss being a particularly lazy and exploitative example. Some games are difficult because of their obstacles, but Shovel Knight removes area of play because it cannot keep up with the upgrades it generously doles out and because creating longer, more intense series of challenges and obstacles is less economic for a game of its size. Some may say that is a balance in design but again, other games do it just as well. Not enforcing strict difficulty and giving a player the "freedom" to play the game how they want means limiting their options as they move further away from the "intended" method of play, and ultimately, there is a method of play, so why not focus that effort and make the game a great example of set limitation rather than a more disappointing and frustrating experience as more command is given to the player?
Well, I can answer that question for you, and I'm sure you can, as well. Shovel Knight strives to be as modern of a game as possible. But in sacrificing strict guidelines and making the game's mechanics as accessible as they are (including the "lives" system, damage system, and checkpoint system), they also sacrificed the potential to create more interesting gameplay challenges and that's a bit disappointing. There are good ideas in the level "gimmicks", but they feel like retreads of Mega Man concepts, even if they are new.
If you want a challenge, play the game without utilizing those systems, you say. Well, if I do that, the game feels like even more of a Mega Man retread but with less impressive ideas on display. Obtainable powerups lack versatility in combat and platforming, with only a few actual challenges allocated towards their use, and those feel fairly straightforward and dull. Even then, one of the easiest powerups to obtain does nothing but turn the game into more of a Mega Man clone. If I want to enjoy the powerups to their fullest extent I need to instead consult the achievement system which ends up feeling more like a hunt for the perfect area to complete the achievement, and that is an entirely separate and inorganic method of playing the game. In short, their inclusion feels like something that not even the developers were sure how to implement. The Treasure system is a perfect example- it's only reward is being able to respawn after death, but then is also used to taunt the player into regaining it, sometimes from impossible situations because of how it floats. But then again, it is also currency- and required in such absurdly large quantities in order to unlock powerups and gated content like specific boss fights that you have to continuously play levels, with all of their imperfections, over and over just to access this content- or play the one money grabbing mini game in the game that is both annoying and yields insubstantial funds. It's an endless, tedious cycle that feels modern in design but in no way fun.
Bosses feel underwhelming in comparison with those from the series it lovingly rips it's structure from, and lack structure outside of new move patterns that aren't more difficult to circumvent, instead adding variety to their repertoire, which isn't really necessary and features no progression Like the mechanics in the levels do. Their movement patterns and telegraphic animations occur quickly and sporadically which can make these parts the least enjoyable time spent playing. For example, Plague Knight and the Enchantress are particular characters with various methods of attack that rely on platforming to avoid but use stage destruction tactics that can lead to unavoidable stage traps, meaning sometimes the best run of a boss comes down to chance rather than mastery. Even when they do add variety in the form of traveling foes on the sparse Overworld map (which doesn't have enough locales to justify it's existence, in my opinion), there are too few and they are short-lived before they can even become anticipated. Shovel Knight's main method of attack is charming, if you can call it that, but it doesn't contribute much to the game world outside of a mentor with the same gimmick, a rival with the same gimmick, and mechanically only adds dirt blocks which are more tedious busywork to separate platforming challenges further. At no point in the game did I feel I had mastered Shovel Knight. Really, there's little to master, unlike the platforming found in Mutant Mudds or Scram Kitty.
Despite this, I still recommend Shovel Knight. I did so without hesitation when I originally reviewed the game. Truly, Shovel Knight is just another Mega Man. But it doesn't reach the highs, though it also hits the lows because of the developer's freedom to invest their time into different options. That makes it, on average, better than the lesser Mega Man titles but not as good as the best ones. And even then, I don't like Mega Man, but I understand there are people that do. But I don't believe it is the masterpiece, the immaculate and perfect Kickstarter title that many have made it out to be. It's a decent game with some care for classic aesthetic and formula, but it's not a surprise. It's just as good as I thought it might be, but it isn't surprisingly better in any of the ways I would hope a great action platformer would be.
Although I like my platfomers with a good deal of polish in direction and difficulty, with set concepts and immediate, split-second highs and lows, that is because I grew up on games with those elements present. Some of those games were twists on classic NES formula and they were good for it. But to me, Shovel Knight is a combination of NES "aesthetic" and "structure" with more modernized tools and direction. Games don't need to adhere to the classic mindset to be good, but the reason those games are memorable and satisfying is because we master them in structure despite what makes them hard. Again, there are games that offer more streamlined challenges with more direct rulesets that are more memorable than Shovel Knight because they take one idea and push it to its extremes. Shovel Knight will be releasing DLC with new mechanics because they exhausted all their ideas for the original character without giving them the care or the detail they deserved, instead branching off in a number of different directions to make the game forgiving. And that's nice, I guess, if you think that old games are dated. But if that's the case, you bought a game for aesthetic and structure when the structure has been done better and the aesthetic is uneven.
It does have a nice soundtrack, though.
If you would like any examples of artistic or mechanic flaws I mentioned in the article, I will try to find screenshots.
Topic: Evan_B Presents: The Contrarian Corner (Read 14833 times)
