Shovel Knight Review: A Shovel in Time

What happens when a developer decides to make a love letter to 8-bit platformers? Apparently, the answer is Shovel Knight.

I had gotten my first taste of Shovel Knight at Supercon (general geekery convention) in Miami a couple of days after the game dropped on the Wii U and 3DS. The developer, Yacht Club Games, had set up a booth with a couple of stations to play the game. I spoke to one of the art designers for the game with a couple of my friends about Zelda, how his game played, and what the influences for the game were. As soon as I finished speaking to him, I walked over to one of the consoles and began to play what I now know to be the King Knight stage of the game. I was instantly pulled in by nostalgia for a game I had never played before. That is something Shovel Knight does very well, it let's you have new fun using familiar ways. This game is an homage to the NES games that came before it. Does it do them any justice, though?

Story

Like many games of its time, the story is not too important, but it does serve as a reason to get you from point A to point B. Essentially, you play as Shovel Knight, a treasure hunter who traveled with his partner, Shield Knight, hunting treasure until one day, they decide to explore the Tower of Fate. While exploring, the two uncover a cursed amulet that caused them to fall to its dark magic. When Shovel Knight awakens, he is outside, the tower has been sealed, and Shield Knight is nowhere to be found. Shovel Knight then falls into a depression and gives up his life of adventuring choosing instead to seclude himself. During this time, the evil Enchantress and her knights of the Order of No Quarter (which is comprised of knights that Shovel Knight has had run-ins with before) take over the land. When Shovel Knight finds out that the Enchantress broke the seal to the Tower of Fate, he sets off on a quest with his trusty shovel to find his beloved Shield Knight and defeat the evil Enchantress.

It's a simple enough premise to get you through if you really care about a story, but in reality, the story is not why I played this game. And it probably won’t be the reason you play this game either. 

A lot of the world building happens during conversations with NPCs and bosses. These all do make the story come alive a bit more, but something that definitely helped me feel like it was MY quest to save Shield Knight is during these sections of the game where you are resting at a campfire and you fall asleep. You begin to dream that Shield Knight is falling from the heavens and it is your job to catch her. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of enemies coming at you from all sides and a lot of treasure to be taken from them, so much so that you might forget about your original goal of catching her. This section drives home that there will be a lot of opposition and things that can get you side-tracked, but that in the end, you are searching for your beloved. The fact that Shovel Knight continues to have this dream throughout the game says a lot about how he feels about his partner without him having to verbalize it at all.

Gameplay

Shovel Knight is a 2D side-scrolling platforming game that borrows its gameplay elements from several older games (Mega Man, Castlevania, Mario Bros, Duck Tales) while using modern game design to make a game that plays extremely well. The game is challenging, but not enough to shun away beginners to the genre. Expert platform gamers should also enjoy the game even if it doesn’t offer the same level of difficulty as some older platform games.

Overworld Map

It’s hard to talk about this game without referring back to the games that inspired it. You move about on a map similar to that of Mario Bros. 3. On this map you can find the levels that you need to get through to complete the game, but there are also towns (tip: talk to everyone because there is a lot of charm and humor thrown into the characters in these towns) in which you spend your hard-earned treasure to buy upgrades to your health, magic, armor, and shovel.

Croaker has a ton of silly puns to share with you. I assure you, they are all ribbiting (see what I did there?!).

Each main level goes with a certain theme (Mole Knight’s level is fire-themed, for example) that matches the boss that you meet at the end of it, much like any Mega Man game. You make your way through each level using your Shovel Blade, a weapon that you slash horizontally with or bounce off enemies heads ala Scrooge McDuck in Duck Tales. You also use “relics” that work in the same way that items in Castlevania worked; you spend your magic power to use them. These range from a wand that shoots fire, to an amulet that lets you become ethereal for a brief moment.

Shovel Knight doing his best Scrooge McDuck impression

The boss fights were such a highlight for me, not just because of the fight itself, but because of the pre-fight banter that Shovel Knight and his opponents would share in. A particular favorite of mine was the Polar Knight, a hulking viking of a man who carries a much larger shovel than you do. He almost sounds like he doesn't care to fight you, but does anyway because after all, it is his job. Another interesting fight is the battle against Tinker Knight, a minuscule man with a welding mask. The initial fight starts off easy enough with him running across his workshop throwing wrenches at you while you pummel him. Once the fight is over, he reappears in a huge mech of his own creation and that is where the real fight begins. Little things like this help keep the game feeling fresh and definitely gave me a laugh.

Mole Knight in action

Each stage has your standard fare of reasons to yell at the game for, but the thing about this game is that if you die, it’s simply because you weren’t good enough. Unlike games that would punish you with unfair game design(remember the electric seaweed from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game on the NES, or even worse, the speeder section in Battletoads?), this game has the advantage that it was made in 2014 and not 1989. Game design and tech have come a long way since then and the developers have made it very clear through their design that this game is challenging, but never unfair.

On top of the main bosses and their respective levels, there are also side-levels that are, usually, relic-themed (you need a specific relic to complete them), wandering adventurers who serve as mini-bosses (who are horribly underdeveloped in my opinion), and a lake where a strange forest deity will assist you if you have a special relic.

Visuals

Shovel Knight’s art assets are done in a beautifully rendered 8 bit style much like the games that it owes its existence to. The game actually uses the same color palette that was used on original NES games back when they were still in production. This does not stop the game from looking fantastic, though. Benefitting from the time it was created, Shovel Knight is able to look the way it does, but still use modern tech (like multilayered parallax backgrounds) to achieve an even more impressive visual style that was likely not possible back in the days of the NES.

The Polar Knight level

Audio

As you would expect from a game that looks like this, the soundtrack features several (AMAZING) chiptune tracks that you would swear have traveled from the past. There really isn’t much else to say about the music in this game other than it fits the mood perfectly and it is great even on its own!

Replay Value

Shovel Knight does sport a New Game + mode, so you actually have a reason to play again, but the game is short and sweet enough that you will want to do that anyway. The benefit of having your game last only a couple of hours (there is a feat within the game that you can achieve if you beat it in 1 hour and 30 minutes, so clearly that is possible) is that it leaves a lot of room for replaying, which I might just go and do after I finish writing this review up.

Wrap-up

Shovel Knight is a beautifully crafted game. It is as if Yacht Club Games took a trip into the past and left behind all of the negative aspects of the games we grew up loving. For those that can’t relate to our silly nostalgia trips because they never played those old NES games, Shovel Knight still offers an amazing, tight, and most of all fun experience that will be sure to challenge your wits and reflexes.

GET SHOVELING!