Spiral Knights Review #1

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Fellow Budget Players! Welcome to the first review of Flat Broke Gaming Review! Today we'll be looking at:

Spiral Knights (SK) is an MMO action title developed by Three Rings and

produced by Sega. It was originally released in June 2011.

Bottom-Line-Up-Front(BLUF): Dungeon delving style fun, nothing fancy, family friendly, and completely enjoyable at first. But if you want to play at the highest levels, get out your pocketbook.

SCORES:

1. Playability: 4/5 It's an easy combat system, and virtually all of the moves are intuitive. It's almost possible to play one-handed, but I don't recommend it.
2. Atmospherics: 3/5 the graphics are family friendly, but telling yourself from the other knights, unless you spend money on skins, is difficult and the music is repetitive. Many of the early maps are carbon copies of each other, only the color schemes and/or monsters change.
3. Community: 3/5 Not much interaction in the dungeons, and almost invariably spammed item sales when you are in town, there wasn't a whole lot to judge this area on. Most players were polite, but the constant “BUY MY STUFF NOW” made me stay out of town as much as possible.
4. Learning Curve: 3/5 The game is simple enough for everyone to learn quickly, but lacks the depth to allow for different styles of play and/or tactics. Hack, slash, shoot, bomb and repeat.
5. Cash Value: 2/5 The fact that the energy needed for everything you do is limited means that some things you'll want to do (most importantly upgrading your gear) virtually requires paying out of pocket.
6. Support: 3/5 Support for the site seemed to be smooth, but then again, I never saw any major updates or had any trouble with the game. That being said, the changes that historically were recorded seemed to be more for what the game designers wanted than what players would want.

OVERALL: 18/30 Not a bad little game, but unless the developers/publishers change the item creation costs, it won't really be worth playing without paying real money for the higher cost items.

BACKSTORY

You and the other knights have crashed on a strange planet known as Cradle. The weirdest part to this is that the planet seems to have been deliberately made as the internal structure are massive machines, their purpose, unknown. (dun Dun DUNNN) You and the other knights must go into the Clockworks in order to gather the supplies ( a huge variety of dropped items and five different colored minerals) you need to survive and make your equipment from. And, deep within the planet, there is a large energy reading, but no one has made it there and returned.

In addition to the random monsters that live in the Clockworks, there are the goblins, a race of crafty engineers. They seem to know more about the Clockworks, but whatever they know, the majority won't say. To them, all the knights are useful for is target practice.

Aside from that, there really doesn't seem to be much of a backstory. And all of that is only found out if you either talk to EVERY Non-Player Character (NPC), or read up on the main web site at: www.spiralknights.com. You can access the game from there, or if you have Steam, it's also available through them. With Steam, it will automatically register all your friends on Steam as your friends in SK.

TUTORIAL

The tutorial levels are light, and really only covers the basics of combat with the gun and sword, your main two weapons (I found out that you can charge your attack through seeing someone else do it, and trial and error). The third weapon is a bomb that you charge and plant, with a few seconds time delay fuse. You can buy the bomb once you've made it to the Rescue Camp on the surface of planet. At the camp, you can train in one set of levels, buy stuff, or head to Haven, which is the main camp, and where you can go into the deeper parts of the clockworks. Once you leave the rescue camp, you can't go back, so get comfortable with the interface.

This game has the most simple combat system I have seen in a long time, heralding from when gaming consoles only had 2-4 buttons to choose from, making it very friendly to young or inexperienced players. The three main weapon groups are: 1. swords (hack n slash and hack some more, the simplest weapon to use), 2. guns (medium ranged, these won't quite cross the larger areas. They have a limited ammo and you must stop firing to reload every 5-6 shots) and bombs (must be charged for about 3 seconds, Their Area of Effect (AOE) is shown when planted). Everyone starts with a gun and sword. Left click moves you (hold to continue to move) right click or Z button triggers an attack in the direction of the cursor. You can also hold down the attack button for a few seconds for a charged attack with any of the weapons. The X button activates shield. To swap between the two weapons of your loadout, you can use the mouse wheel or spacebar. I found using the mouse to direct and Z, X, and Space worked the best for me.

The Maps of the beginner levels are simple, with small monsters that are easily handled. You also run into exploding blocks, time delay exploding blocks, various breakable blocks, locked and switch triggered doors, and all of the other basic ingredients for your classic dungeon delving games. Monsters when defeated drop crowns (in-game money), heat (which improves your equipment from level one to ten) materials (used in the crafting of better gear), equipment (rarely), and useable items. The useable items are often throwable potions that have a variety of special effects such as shock and stun, but also include health capsules, which most often look like a Pokemon ball. Everything past the basics I found through trial and error, or from watching one of the other knights do something and trying to emulate them.

HAVEN AND BEYOND

The main town of Haven has all of the usual amenities you'd expect in a game like this: armor sellers, weapon sellers, random NPCs that have mostly useless information for you, etc. The main problem is that NONE of them are labeled, so you spend a few minutes trying to find the one you want. The main area you'll visit is the Arcade, therein you'll find the different gates available to you to go into the clockworks, kill stuff, gather loot, and improve your gear. One of the best features of this game is that everyone on your party gets every crown, point of heat, health heart, token, and mineral that the party picks up. They aren't divided amongst you, you each get the total amount. Materials and equipment are divided randomly, which can be occasionally frustrating as you'll see the last blue crystal you need for your next recipe go to the guy next to you, but the fact that you don't have to squabble for who gets what is great.

Going past level 8 of any gate is only possible once you have either bought or crafted two star equipment. There are limits like this for three, four, and five stars as well. Also within the clockworks, there are specially marked doors that can only be opened by using extra energy, these have a warning next to them that they are significantly harder than the level they appear in. They mean it. After being killed several times in one of these rooms, I ran out of energy to revive myself, and had to quit for the day. This along with the level limits means that you can't accidentally get in way over your head.

The single most limiting factor is energy. Everything you do requires energy, elevator rides, crafting gear, reviving yourself, etc. There are two types of energy in the game, the free kind is mist energy, and you can only gather up to 100 ME at any time. It accumulates one point every 15 minutes, so you have a full tank about every 24 hours. Crystal energy is bought and you can have thousands of CE if you so choose. It is possible to buy CE with crowns, but it is at the going market rates, and the average price I've seen is 6000 crowns per 100 CE. If you want to shell out your cash, you can get 700 CE for $2.45, and the more you spend , the better the rates. This is the major holdup I have with this game. Since your stats are only based on your gear, you have to buy or craft better gear to play to the end. Three star items require 200, four star 400 and five star 800 energy to craft, and buying them for crowns gets expensive fast. In other words, unless you want to grind out days and days of dungeon delving to get enough crowns to buy the energy you'll need to get five star equipment to make it to the end, you will have to pay some cash to get what you want. It's not impossible to earn enough in the game, but it will take a long while to get the gear you'll need.

LAST THOUGHTS

This is a nice little game, simple and easy to play. I enjoyed it, I just can't see myself wanting to play more than an hour or so at a time, and with the energy limit, that's about what you can do. That and the lack of higher end complexity and the amount of grinding needed to play this completely free of cash draws the fun factor down quite a bit, and relegates this to a title that I’d only occasionally want to go back to.

That's it for now, tune in next week when I go all anime and review Rusty Hearts. Thanks for playing, and GG!

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