Shovel Knight |OT| The 8-bit adventures of Butt Butt Goes to Europe & Australia

Finished the game. Took me about 4 hours for those wondering.

I thought it was good and I'm very happy with the kickstarter purchase. Clearly it is a very highly polished platformer that has a great attention to detail and is often a joy to play.

However... (Be warned, negative thoughts so only read if you really want to)

I do not, think it is a great game and had several issues with it. I don't want to harp on the phase issue, but it really does break a lot of the game and removes any real non self imposed challenge.

This is 95% of the game for me:
http://abload.de/img/good_not_great3gjd5.gif

But even beyond that, I have a few other problems. Several areas such as
(area spoilers)
the ice, cog and any dark areas
were just not fun to play. Even with phase fixed/removed, I would find them in particular a lot more frustrating than enjoyable. Which might seem odd, given I loved 1001 spikes, but in that game the challenge was the entire point and you couldn't really skip it by choice.

Case in point, the auto scrolling sections I found to be terrible.

Other issues include the death/gold system where there is no real tension to losing gold (you buy everything useful after a few levels) and other strange design choices like the destructible checkpoints (for more gems, which you have plenty of). It all adds up to something that is frustrating close to being a great game with a lot of work into it, but all the bits just didn't come together for me.

I'll probably check out the other stuff, but I think it is a "one and done" game for me. I do however think that speed run/challenge people will absolutely love it for a long time to come. I just feel if you can't make your own fun like me, you might not get all that much more out of it.

Hero said:
That review was pretty terrible and sounds like he was just trying to come up with excuses to hate it and completely missed the point that it's a love letter to that era of gaming. I regret giving this a click to be honest.
Click to expand...

I pretty much agree with that review, even if I'd give it another point or so.
 
I feel like, consistently, the phase locket is by far the worst relic for almost every situation. It might help you eke through it, but it isn't going to help you kill anything faster. Stuff will take longer and you'll drain your magic away, and if you use it as a crutch then you'll be screwed when you do run out of magic power. It's much more fun to try to figure out which relic you can use at a given moment to let you eke out that extra hit (this is referring primarily to bosses). During normal stages, the only time I ever find a use for the phase locket is when spikes are on the screen.
 
Aeana said:
I feel like, consistently, the phase locket is by far the worst relic for almost every situation. It might help you eke through it, but it isn't going to help you kill anything faster. Stuff will take longer and you'll drain your magic away, and if you use it as a crutch then you'll be screwed when you do run out of magic power. It's much more fun to try to figure out which relic you can use at a given moment to let you eke out that extra hit (this is referring primarily to bosses). During normal stages, the only time I ever find a use for the phase locket is when spikes are on the screen.
Click to expand...

Not sure how far into you are, but I never ran out of magic power and it was useful to skip past every enemy in the game.

However the "it's much more fun" bit is perfectly valid and is all about how you choose to play. This is what I think the point of contention will be.
 
OrbitalBeard said:
Yes, it supports off-TV play.
Click to expand...
Awesome. Thanks for the reply.
I saw some talk about it not due to some diary mechanics or something, but never saw the response to that, so glad to hear confirmation that it does.
Would be awesome if the Wii U had a push feature so it was there when I get home from work.
 
toddhunter said:
Not sure how far into you are, but I never ran out of magic power and it was useful to skip past every enemy in the game.

However the "it's much more fun" bit is perfectly valid and is all about how you choose to play the game. This is what I think the point of contention will be at some stage.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I liked the fluid flexibility of Shovel Knight's difficulty. The Phase Locket is a big crutch and the checkpoints help, but you can avoid both if you choose.
 
toddhunter said:
Not sure how far into you are, but I never ran out of magic power and it was useful to skip past every enemy in the game.

However the "it's much more fun" bit is perfectly valid and is all about how you choose to play the game. This is what I think the point of contention will be at some stage.
Click to expand...

Working my way through Tinker Knight's stage now.
I just can't imagine getting any enjoyment whatsoever out of spamming the phase locket through the stages. And it also sounds like way more trouble than it's worth, considering how short its duration is. I dunno, I just feel like using that as criticism for the game is as silly as criticizing SMB3 because you can fly over most of the stages.
 
Personally if your using the phase locket that much, your sorta taking the fun and challenge out of the game yourself, you don't HAVE to use it. I couldn't imagine spamming that button constantly. Just would become a monotonous thing that would drive me nuts. I only use it for spikes.
 
toddhunter said:
Finished the game. Took me about 4 hours for those wondering.

I thought it was good and I'm very happy with the kickstarter purchase. Clearly it is a very highly polished platformer that has a great attention to detail and is often a joy to play.

However... (Be warned, negative thoughts so only read if you really want to)

I do not, think it is a great game and had several issues with it. I don't want to harp on the phase issue, but it really does break a lot of the game and removes any real non self imposed challenge.

This is 95% of the game for me:
http://abload.de/img/good_not_great3gjd5.gif

But even beyond that, I have a few other problems. Several areas such as
(area spoilers)
the ice, cog and any dark areas
were just not fun to play. Even with phase fixed/removed, I would find them in particular a lot more frustrating than enjoyable. Which might seem odd, given I loved 1001 spikes, but in that game the challenge was the entire point and you couldn't really skip it by choice.

Case in point, the auto scrolling sections I found to be terrible.

Other issues include the death/gold system where there is no real tension to losing gold (you buy everything useful after a few levels) and other strange design choices like the destructible checkpoints (for more gems, which you have plenty of). It all adds up to something that is frustrating close to being a great game with a lot of work into it, but all the bits just didn't come together for me.

I'll probably check out the other stuff, but I think it is a "one and done" game for me. I do however think that speed run/challenge people will absolutely love it for a long time to come. I just feel if you can't make your own fun like me, you might not get all that much more out of it.



I pretty much agree with that review, even if I'd give it another point or so.
Click to expand...

Yea, sounds like you didn't play New Game Plus at all which really does ramp up the challenge of the game considerably.
 
Aeana said:
Working my way through Tinker Knight's stage now.
I just can't imagine getting any enjoyment whatsoever out of spamming the phase locket through the stages. And it also sounds like way more trouble than it's worth, considering how short its duration is. I dunno, I just feel like using that as criticism for the game is as silly as criticizing SMB3 because you can fly over most of the stages.
Click to expand...

I've been down this argument path before and I know I'm not going to convince anybody that feels differently! I'll leave it there for now because I don't think everybody is ready to believe just yet.

You'll all see ;)

Shard said:
Yea, sounds like you didn't play New Game Plus at all which really does ramp up the challenge of the game considerably.
Click to expand...

Yep, just the first level.
 
Just finished the game in 5 hours, missing one relic and not really replaying any stages since I got almost everything as far as I'm aware on my first try through each one.

I really liked the game, but compared to ye olde NES games it was just way, way easier. No way I could beat any of the Mega Man games in 5 hours with no prior playtime. Is this a bad thing? I'm not sure - I would have liked to let the game "absorb" me a bit more through challenge, and I feel like it would have had a bigger impact on me that way. Then again, like I said previously, a lot of the lack of difficulty comes from the perfect controls and the ridiculously well-designed and polished levels/enemy setups. A lot of the stuff in old NES games was hard in part due to what we now identify as bad design practices, and those are completely absent in Shovel Knight.

I think Chris Remo has mentioned this a couple of times on the Idle Thumbs podcast, where games that follow "good design rules" to a tee aren't necessarily good at all. Obviously, Shovel Knight is nowhere close to being a bad game in any sense of the word, so that doesn't completely apply, but the concept itself is interesting to me. A game like Dota is completely broken on the surface with pretty much every single feature being a bad design choice, but it all ends up working great together, creating a completely unique game with tons of "personality" (gameplay-wise, as opposed to art style etc).

Now, Shovel Knight is honestly one of the "objectively" most well-made games I have ever played, based on my first impressions of the title, and that alone makes it a fantastic experience. I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say here. Maybe the game needed to be a bit "worse" and more unfair to resonate stronger with me? Feels weird, mang.

However, I'm not down on the game at all, since there are several ways to create modular difficulty in place, which is something I wish all games have. My next playthrough will be
New Game+
with destroying all the checkpoints. Unfortunately, the incentive to destroy all of these being more money to spend didn't really work out. I had purchased everything I could several stages prior to the end, so it'll have to be considered a self-imposed difficulty. Still, that's fine. Not using certain relics (such as Phasing) would also significantly increase environmental hazards. So yeah, I'll be utilizing these options for more playthroughs. I barely felt like I got to know the boss patterns before they were dead, so I'm sure there's still a lot more to see/learn in this game.

Also <3 virt, dat music.


I give the game a 1 out of 1.

Edit: Oh yeah, honorable mention goes to this game actually making me laugh out loud to actual stuff happening in gameplay. Some of the things in the levels were so ridiculously charming I just sat there laughing for half a minute every now and then. So good.
 
TyrantGuardian said:
I really liked the game, but compared to ye olde NES games it was just way, way easier. No way I could beat any of the Mega Man games in 5 hours with no prior playtime.
Click to expand...

Are you sure about this? I can't look at the original games here because I have played them to death since I was a kid, but neither MM9 nor MM10 took me any longer than that to beat on my first try when they came out. I don't know what your playtime was like, though.
 
Starting to get the sense from the various impressions the game (in the first playthrough) is too easy to a fault, which is ok if the NG+ is much more balanced for the people who fly through every level without a hitch. Curious to hear how people find the difficultly of NG+, if it's more what they would have expected the first playthrough to be balanced like or not.

Edit: Then again, I actually died on the first boss once lol, so I will probably find the balance to be pretty good myself.
 
Minsc said:
Starting to get the sense the game (in the first playthrough) is too easy to a fault, which is ok if the NG+ is much more balanced for the people who fly through every level without a hitch.
Click to expand...

I felt that way initially, but starting around specter knight and plague knight, I started to feel like the difficulty was pretty good. But I expected a game with difficulty on the level of Mega Man, which is about what it's like. Seems like a lot of people remember those games as being a lot more difficult than they are. The major difference here is that death has a much weaker penalty, which I think is certainly a fair point to criticize. If this game had lives, I do wonder if people would be feeling differently.
 
Aeana said:
Are you sure about this? I can't look at the original games here because I have played them to death since I was a kid, but neither MM9 nor MM10 took me any longer than that to beat on my first try when they came out. I don't know what your playtime was like, though.
Click to expand...

Well compared to Battletoads it sure isn't hard!

But I think it is about on par with the old NES games, especially some of the later sections. However the big difference in this game you basically get infinite retries and some pretty generous checkpoints (and also ph... an ability which shall remain nameless).

Which are all good modern game design choices, but just make things a bit too quick and easy in relative terms.
 
there's the destroying checkpoint thing, but you get so much gold you can buy everything like 2/3rds through the game without destroying any of them. Its not much of an incentive.
 
I guess I should note that I'm personally destroying most of the checkpoints. I guess that's something I should say when talking about difficulty, because people who are not doing that will probably have an entirely different experience. Usually what I've been doing is only leaving the third checkpoint in each stage up so I can start from the middle of a stage if I die.
 
toddhunter said:
I think it is about on par with the old NES games, especially some of the later sections. However in this game you basically get infinite retries and some pretty generous checkpoints (and also ph... an ability which shall remain nameless).
Click to expand...

i think that's where the feeling of 'easiness' is coming in, the basically infinite retries and checkpoints. i played a few levels last night and i died a few times, although all but one were before i realized how pogoing even worked (see a few pages back if you want to join me in laughing at myself). i don't feel like i was ever that great at the original megamans, etc, but i do feel like it'd be on par if it weren't for the checkpoints & infinite lives. then again i was always a little rpg geek at heart, so who knows.
 
ViewtifulJC said:
there's the destroying checkpoint thing, but you get so much gold you can buy everything like 2/3rds through the game without destroying any of them. Its not much of an incentive.
Click to expand...

That is where I feel lives would have been a better choice. In the worst case, you just let the player buy them to get through hard sections. But at least it gives you something to spend your money on.

By the end I didn't even bother collecting the bags.

Aeana said:
I guess I should note that I'm personally destroying most of the checkpoints. I guess that's something I should say when talking about difficulty, because people who are not doing that will probably have an entirely different experience. Usually what I've been doing is only leaving the third checkpoint in each stage up so I can start from the middle of a stage if I die.
Click to expand...

I did do that by accident in the first real stage (not knowing how the destroying worked, I thought it was free money!) but luckily I only died once to the boss. I do agree this would ramp up the difficulty and the enjoyment factor for me as well, but it is hard to know that until the game is over.
 
Aeana said:
Are you sure about this? I can't look at the original games here because I have played them to death since I was a kid, but neither MM9 nor MM10 took me any longer than that to beat on my first try when they came out. I don't know what your playtime was like, though.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, I can't even beat MM9 and MM10 and I've easily put in 10 hours+ into each game. Maybe I'm just randomly bad at Mega Man specifically? But yeah, I've never beaten a single Mega Man game this fast, or even come close to be honest. Part of that might be running out of lives/rare checkpointing, I suppose, but I also feel like the moment to moment gameplay was a lot less obvious in Mega Man and resulted in getting hit in ways I couldn't foresee, something that almost never happens in Shovel Knight.

I destroyed a couple of checkpoints, but to be honest I finished most levels only dying 2-3 times so that barely even mattered. My highest death count in a single level was 6, according to the credits. Actually, maybe 120fps (assuming the game is actually running at that, still not 100% sure) makes the game quite a bit easier due to more responsive controls as well? I guess I shouldn't be complaining about that :P
 
andymcc said:
i don't even understand how someone can play video games without experiencing this era.

i'm an old man.
Click to expand...

I have been really enjoying some of the Virtual Console Miiverse feeds on the Wii U. Some of these people are experiencing the games for the first time and having a blast!

Would love to see a Contra one, though...
 
19 & 21 said:
Really don't think it matters man. You'll either like it or you won't and if you do there's a whole library of things to check out after you finish.
Click to expand...

Excellent, thanks! I'll probably buy it.

andymcc said:
i don't even understand how someone can play video games without experiencing this era.

i'm an old man.
Click to expand...

I've never played a lot of stuff, primarily anything pre-1990. I usually try a lot of games, but I've never had reliable access to an NES hardware (or anything made before that). I have played a lot of Game Boy games, but those aren't usually the games cited as inspiration from Shovel Knight.
 
What Console should i buy this on? I dont have a PC right now but will at the end of the year.

Is the 3ds absolutely as good as WiiU? I was thinking that would be best because its portable.
 
DeVeAn said:
Another one here, can't decide Wii U or PC?
Click to expand...

Well I'm getting Wii U over PC to take advantage of DDP, for off-TV play, and Digger's Diary. I figure I would get the Steam version during the next Winter sale. Plus I'm betting the cards will be cheaper by then because I am so crafting a badge for that game.
 
TheMink said:
What Console should i buy this on? I dont have a PC right now but will at the end of the year.

Is the 3ds absolutely as good as WiiU? I was thinking that would be best because its portable.
Click to expand...

I'm sure WiiU has off screen play (doesn't it?) for some level of portability (around your house).
 
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