Even about 20 hours in, I’m still going back and attempting to reach the end of a run with every knight at least once – not out of a sense of completion, but because each playthrough is fun in its own way and requires a unique mastery of that specific knight’s special skills and quirks. In just about every case, each of the 12 knights has a completely distinct style of play. That element of high-risk, high-reward, and fast paced play is right up my alley. That means he’s able to kill most enemies in just one hit if you’re able to get your gem meter up to x2 or x3, but the catch is that he loses that buff and is back to just dealing one damage as soon as you use a potion. For instance, Specter Knight takes damage when he hits a potion and can only restore health by defeating enemies Propeller Knight is incredibly good when it comes to defeating lone foes but is actively punished when he tries to chain them together and my personal favorite, Black Knight, starts with a measly three HP but has the incredibly powerful special ability to turn his gem meter into extra attack power. Picking a new knight is much more than just a cosmetic choice – it can completely change the rules. You could play it slow and focus on optimizing your chains while being extra cautious about your life, even though you run the risk of taking too long and letting the stack of enemies fill up to an unmanageable level or you could play it fast and focus on smaller chains done quickly, at the risk of making a careless mistake by bumping into an enemy you don’t have the HP to deal with.īut Pocket Dungeon’s real genius lies in its variety of playable characters. It’s an incredibly well-crafted design for a puzzle game and facilitates a ton of different approaches to each level. Fortunately, if you start to run low on health, you can also find life restoring potions that will restore two hearts a piece. Since you can only take so many attacks from individual enemies, it's paramount that you seek out these opportunities to clear large groups at once. Where things get “puzzley” is when you attack an enemy that is adjacent to others of the same type: you only take damage from the one you’re hitting, but you deal damage to the whole chain, which lets you clear entire rows and columns of enemies in just a few strikes. All of this to the tune of an incredible soundtrack that consists almost entirely of modern arrangements of the classic Shovel Knight soundtrack, with a couple of awesome new tracks for the new knights as well. It’s all very simple and intuitive: You can clear enemies and blocks by moving into them to attack, but every time you make an attack you also take damage equal to that enemy’s offensive stat, with the key exception being if your attack is a killing blow on your target. It’s simple on the surface: you control Shovel Knight or one of 12 other playable characters and move them around a 8x8 grid in four directions, while blocks and a rogue’s gallery of Shovel Knight enemies drop from the heavens like tetrominos in Tetris. Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon is a block-matching-puzzle-adventure-roguelite, which I know sounds like I just reached into a bucket, pulled out a handful of unrelated genres, and mashed them together – but somehow developers Vine and Yacht Club Games managed to make this concoction work.
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