Spiral Knights and the Unexpected Update

[size=+1]Spiral Knights and the Unexpected Update[/size]​

How the hell have I not reviewed this? Seriously! I am really surprised I've never written about this! I went back and checked my old review thread in the bowels of the General Board and it's not there! The dust was vast! Cobwebs were huge!

Anyway, that's irrelevant because Spiral Knights was something I definitely played, liked and then never reviewed. I could have sworn I did review it somewhere...

By Celestia's G-String, I have not seen this in a while...This what I was doing before Everypony and MLP:FIM​

Ah! I knew I had one somewhere. Like unleashing my Year Six Schoolwork on my University Lecturers, I'm gonna let you read this because this is what Spiral Knights used to be like. That's for people who either want to know about the old game in a greater detail than I will go into here or want more of my stuff that they haven't seen yet. Or want to contrast my work here with my work back then. Oh boy...that joke about Monty Python lines slipping into the text does not work at all...I might as well have shouted 'I like Monty Python too' every so often.

This of course assuming that I even have fans that would do that...Tyro! Stay on target or this whole article will be redundant text that doesn't move us forwards! Like it usually is!

The Too Long/Didn't Read Version (Because I don't like Abbreviations Much)

Spiral Knights was developed by Three Rings, a small studio owned by Sega. Think Sonic Team but they make MMO's instead of endlessly figure out how to make that pesky third dimension behave in between writing awful dialogue. And secretly planning on how to get Big's Fishing Levels into the next game. I have millions of these!

The story goes that technologically advanced and heavily armed minors known as 'The Spiral Order' have discovered a planet called Cradle and set up a base of operations there. Why? Because the inside of the planet happens to be a series of mazes and dungeons of labyrinthine proportions that even alter their position as time goes on. This place has been named 'The Clockworks' and it's here that the bulk of the game will be spent; descending into the Clockworks towards the Core of the planet, fighting every nasty looking thing on your way. Your goal is to reap the bountiful minerals of The Clockworks to earn money to pay for more and explore The Clockworks to fully understand this strange place.

That's it! Just your sword, gun or bombs against thousands of monsters and it is awesome! Seriously, I really like this game and the evolution it has taken over the years from when I first wrote about it. Back then, it was a good game held back by an irritating need to pay to play when it was advertised as Free to Play. Nowadays, it's a bargain! I compared it to The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past when it's closer to Alien Swarm with more weapon diversity and swords. However, the game can now genuinely call itself 'Free To Play' without a smirk and it makes the game 1000% times better on it's own. But it's update just keeps on rolling to touch pretty much everything about the game to the point that it's almost unrecognisable.

The biggest change is the overhaul of the Energy System. Originally, you needed Energy for everything; travelling between levels, forging things, opening certain doors, reviving yourself when dead. All of that! I wouldn't be surprised if you needed energy for breathing or logging on. It was horrendous that you only got 100 energy free everyday. That was a pitiful amount for your day to day travels. Pitiful! To play this at any real level, you have to spend money to get a greater amount of 'Crystal' energy to get a decent playthrough because the difficulty level for the game could get pretty high. Especially when a boss rolled past you. It might have started at around £1.50 but that could stack up fast.

Now, you get around for free! Lifts will no longer charge you which is wonderful! You have to pay Crowns (the in-game currency) for making new equipment rather than your energy as well. Furthermore, it's a massive boost to the overall appeal of the game to make sure it's not charging you for using the lifts that carry you around The Clockworks. It's no longer bleeding you so badly. Or unnecessarily. Instead, you spend Energy on very expensive or rare items that you can get from drops or the auction house anyway. Basically, it's a new currency that pays for everything from weapons to equipment components to Sparks of Life.

For Spark of Life, read Extra Life. Originally, you had to pay to bring yourself back with Energy in steadily increasing amounts. This got horribly expensive, forcing you to retreat if you're running out. The frustration was in having to resign to just letting all the stuff melt away into the darkness because you couldn't stump up for the next revive. Either you paid a stupidly high amount of Crowns or you paid in cash for more Crystal Energy. If you don't keep your equipment as good as you can, you'll be robbed and killed and milked of your money. It's evil and annoying.

The new system is actually better but it's not perfect. Now, you get a free revival every new level you enter into. As long as your equipment isn't too out matched and your paying attention, you'll muddle through it with just that free recovery, most likely. However, once that's done with you have the Spark of Life system to fall back on. This is an extra life that you have to pay for. While some missions will give you them for free but you can buy them individually for 50 energy. Which is...actually quite reasonable. And you can get ten of them for the cost of 4 of the emergency Sparks (which is 200 Energy for 10 starks). Furthermore, Sparks can be found as drops. Also, you can get special prize boxes that give you a small bundle of them too from various places. So, it's not that bad because Sparks are abundant but it's still limiting if you run out of energy.

If you lose, that's it. Your made to pack up or pay up just like the old system. The difference here is that you can usually come back and try again. If you come back, you still have that one revive for nothing to let you play through it, despite having no remaining Sparks. The Sparks of Life are useful but not completely necessary. Which is much, much better than what felt like an extortion racket because you can continue to play still. It's harder, sure, but you're not being barred from playing entirely any more. It forces you to come back stronger or get help if you're struggling with something, which makes some sense to me. It makes you seriously size up your own skill at the game and the actual power of your equipment. Usually, a second blade is all you need. I still wouldn't call it 100% fair when it's competing with things like Mabinogi or Elsword or even Maple Story. It wants to hold onto the Arcade-y feel of it's gameplay badly by making you pay for extra lives but it is profoundly better than before. Energy is still absurdly expensive but it's not impossible to gather enough Crowns for 100 energy. Plus, Energy isn't as vital as it once was, meaning you can get around the necessity.

Where it get's awkward is the new Crafting system. To make new weapons or upgrade current ones, you have to do the whole RPG thing of building them according to recipes. While recipies being something you have to find and buy is annoying busy work, you then have to put the recipe together. Pretty standard.

Now, Spiral Knights will actually bar you from playing sections of the game until you upgrade your equipment. And you have to upgrade all of it! Weapon, Shield, Helmet and Armour. The central ingredients of these require an Orb of some level of Alchemy. And they can be frustratingly hard to get enough off when you look for more valuable items. Infact, 5 and 4 star items become like holy grails! Ingredients at that level became a hell of a chore to get hold off. Which they should be when they're the most powerful in the game. You grind cash and either try the markets for tones of money or a wad of energy at the Supply Depot. Both are expensive and that cap gets raised, possibly doubled, every grade you go up by. It get's steep fast. You can pay actual money to get there fast but for those on a budget, man is that a frustratingly long amount of time spent grinding. Especially if you're just doing it to pass an Equipment Upgrade checkpoint. Irritatingly, passing one of these will yield you an Orb of Alchemy at the level you needed. The last checkpoint I passed had me trying to scramble for as many of these Orbs as I could find. It's frustrating to be given one at that point.

"Where the hell was this when I needed it, yeh Tin-Headed, Pint-Sized Prat!?" And then a violent but largely impotent shaking of the fist at the screen.

You're running over the same three or four places where you saw lots of loot once over and over. I'm sure I would have better productivity trying to be the PR man for One Direction, trying to convince people that punching them wasn't worth it.

With that out of the way, you can actually start to enjoy the game. And thank Celestia, you can properly now without having to stump up cash somewhere because it's demanded of you. You still might if you're in that 'This crap will not beat me, so help me mighty Zeus!" mood but that's down to your own spending habits.

The weapon system has had some welcome additions. You have a choice of three weapon types: sword, gun, bomb. Simple, except that they all break down further into what kind of damage they inflict. Some are faster than others, some will set things on fire, blah, blah, blah. You now have to think about how you want to inflict damage. Do you want just straight up, uncomplicated power? Do you want to exploit enemy weaknesses? Do you want to be able to deal with mobs of enemies quickly or safely? Do you want to be close and personal or be able to pick of targets from the sidelines? You like bananas? It's all up to you! Seriously, there's a healthy amount of depth to this battle system while maintaining it's simplicity. You can have a gun and a sword to handle anything. You can have to guns and switch between the two to exploit more weaknesses. You can even have two swords to do the same thing. But you have to hold onto the shield so no akimbo Autoguns or dual wielding Big Beast Bashers.

Even so, your shield isn't as limited to just making sure your not instantly dead. One thing that appears to never be hinted or mentioned is a Shield Bash attack that makes you dash forwards and stun anything you hit. This is a handy move if you want to charge into an attacking cluster of enemies and gain the upper hand as the stun will slow their movements and attacking speed. Handy to have.

The other move that's been slipped in there quietly is a sort of dodge. Your character just dashes for a short moment very quickly to where your cursor is pointed. This has a cool-down to make sure you don't spam it however it is handy for avoiding traps or slow attacks. Some of the faster ones could still catch me. But again handy.

To further help your travels, you now have something called a Battle Sprite. For Battle Sprite, read Pokemon.

In essence, this is a little pet that will perform a special move on cue. You feed the sprite ingredients from your inventory to increase its heat level then feed it a special item made from a specific colour of mineral called a 'Mote'. Your sprite has a prefered type of this mote that you need to feed it every time you reach the threshold of a new level. Every so often, your Sprite will ask for an Evo-whatsit so that it can transform into a higher level version of itself. Yeah, these things will evolve but level up through gluttony. Seriously, Sprites eat your ingredients and Motes. The logic is that they eat springs, dust, crystal shards and Mugs of Misery. I'm pretty sure that'll kill a Squirtle before you get anywhere near an evolution. Thankfully, the Sprites are able to pull their own weight. The one I got - the white, pudgy, flying kitten one - shoots a weak laser attack, raises the likelihood of an enemy dropping health and can allow me to slightly boost the damage against a certain type of enemy. Very handy in missions. The other ones are more about power and inflicting poison. Me being a clutz, I went with the health one.

One last thing on weapons is the new system for leveling your weapons. Originally, it was all automatic XP grinding like the weapons in Ratchet and Clank. You are only as powerful as your equipment and they'd grow slightly more powerful over time from a starting point then gain a full suite of perks as they approach their full power at level 10. The full potential of a weapon is always shown along with how it would perform immediately.

Now, it's no longer an automatic process. And I have no idea why it had to be changed. The new system is largely needless busywork when the last system was easy and fast. That might be it actually...I might mean that a player could level up quicker or something...Anyway, the way it works is that a weapon gains heat just as before. However, it will now need to be forged before it is allowed to increase in level.

Forging needs special heat crystals that match the weapon's star rating. Once you collect a large number of them, you have the choice of attempting to forge the weapon with three levels of certainty of success:

- 'I Like to Live Dangerously' which has the highest chance of failure but is the cheapest of the three.

- 'The Middle Way' which has better odds of success and has the chance of yielding a greater number of added bonuses like an extra level or a heat bonus. It does require a greater number of heat crystals.

- 'Dead Cert' which as a 100% success rate and can net you a level boost, a heat bonus and even a 'Forge Prize Box' which is a goodie bag of nice things you definitely want. I got one once and it contained 12 Sparks of Life. They're worth picking up if you can but they're rare. This is the most expensive, making it the difficult to perform regularly, of course.

This is the part where the changes are bafflingly needless. I don't mind this as I'm always picking up more crystals but all it serves to do is force me to play at a certain Clockwork depth in order to level up a certain piece of equipment. Seeing as the game makes a leap in difficulty with every five or ten levels towards the core, things can get very frustrating if you just looking to grind equipment because you get nothing for dying. Which you're likely to do because your equipment isn't good enough yet. A frustrating cycle, huh? This is one change I'm not entirely pleased with.

How about the level design? It's stepped up a lot since I last tried to pass through this. It may be because I've reached further down to the core and so it's pulling out more stops to be evil but I now hold the level where rocket launchers are firing in all directions to be one of the best because it becomes very creative at certain parts. Even the boss they have was a big challenge for me whilst also being very inventive. Otherwise, it's not changed much. It's still a long stretch of dungeons that have a small mix of things to toss you way depending on which type of level you're on. Basically just usually linear gauntlets for you and friends to battle through. Nothing wrong with them but I'm starting to get tired of them at my more advanced stage of the game.

A curious addition I approve of is that there's now two ways of playing the game. You can poodle around in the Clockworks normally by just entering a gate and charging headlong for the core or you can do the large number of missions on offer. Frankly, the Missions are what you ought to be doing if you want to play this game on a regular basis. They provide a tutorial and regular information dumps as you work through them, operating at lower levels of the Clockworks. They can be a slog sometimes.

Some will be just an exposition dump between some NPC that nets you free stuff and some will be a few stages of the Clockworks you fight through. They say it's a mission but they're always just battle through everything to the end. The story is there to give some flavour but you can ignore it and miss very little. The only mission that has asked me to actually achieve an objective has been one where I placed a sword on a pedestal. And even then, the linear nature of each level meant I had to or I'd never progress. Maybe some freedom from the linear path and engagement with the writing might be nice but it's not a game-breaker and a minor point.

Why will you bother? Because you get tons of useful stuff if you do. Everything from Sparks of Life to new recipes to handy Alchemy ingredients. The rewards for completing the missions are worth it to gain more powerful gear. It's a bit of a chore but the simple gameplay can make up for that.

Lastly, there's the aesthetic of this game too. Along with everything else, they've added extra textures in all different directions. Icons look better, the menus look better. Even some of the newer weapons look cool. They keep with the chunky, metal machine look that get's somewhat more pronounced as the game goes on. I think it looks quite fetching, especially for the guns. The various pistols in this game seem to take their key elements from Nerf guns usually. And I think Nerf guns are pretty well designed toys. Yes, they looks slightly like toys but not enough to look weak or useless. In fact, some can look pretty sweet. How about the Umbra Driver for example?

Now there's something you don't want to be on the business end of​

This is a shadow weapon. I like how that's 'generated' by the rows of canisters like cylinders in a V8 engine and how the handle ends in that slightly redundant lump. It's not there for any other reason than a little style. Classy.

So, I'm overwhelmingly for this game. Would I recommend this to you? For what it is, yeah. You'll have to get over the fact that you'll be playing for the gameplay over the story of the world. You can try and get into it but it's rarely all that important. You'll have to brave some repetition in environment and a lot of repetition in enemies. And learn to take defeat in your stride.

But, you'll find a lot of simple hack and slash action with a reasonable amount of specialisation that can even be co-ordinated between a group of friends. It'll give a hearty challenge while letting you come back as many times as you think you can manage. Plus, laser-firing Angel-kitty that eats rusty springs. What's not to like?

Apart from forging.