Shovel Knight: King of Cards
Platform: Wii U
Time to beat: 8 hours, 24 minutes
Pros
• The same polished, nostalgia-inducing aesthetics and overall design that made Shovel Knight a masterclass in how to make retro-likes without actually confining you to the past
• A lot of content to dive into compared to other expansions
• Much of that content is available via branching paths and other optional methods, leaving a main game that’s still fairly quick to beat if you want a short experience
• Story carries the usual Yacht Club wit, with an extra emphasis on humor and silliness this time around
• King Knight’s main movement — a shoulder bash that upon contact converts into a spin behaving similarly to Shovel Knight’s downward plunge — combined with Yacht Club’s usual tight and punchy platforming design, can result in exhilarating strings of bounce combos that are satisfying to pull off
• Hallmarks of quality Shovel Knight level design, such as introducing new elements and mechanics in a relatively safe environment before escalating the complexity (thought not as much, see Cons), are present once more
• More plentiful levels are also much shorter, giving a quicker sense of progress and more stopping points for short-winded players
• Several of the new level mechanics were a delight to figure out and experiment with
• The card game component is thankfully not at all required to beat the game
Cons
• King Knight’s core mechanics are my least favorite in the series of campaigns. They never stopped feeling counterintuitive throughout the game — why should I have to ram my head against a wall before jumping on an enemy? How does spinning suddenly make the attack more effective? “Clunky” comes to mind as a descriptor for the movement, but that’s probably too harsh. It’s just not as good as Specter Knight’s midair slicing, Plague Knight’s high-flying bomb propulsion, or even Shovel Knight’s simple plunge.
• The bite-size levels don’t do nearly as good a job of ramping up the difficulty of the mechanics and mixing them together in interesting ways by the end of the level. This isn’t without exceptions, but more often than not, things would just start to get interesting and then I’d see the exit and say, “That’s it?”
• The above point is much more frustrating when combined with the fact that many of the campaign’s best level mechanics are practically one-and-done. I thought the various levels placed within each villainous knight’s setting would build on one another, but they often don’t at all, opting to simply introduce brand new mechanics and leave the previous ones underdeveloped.
• I don’t care about King Knight or his journey to become an even worse individual. At all. The humor hit home fairly frequently, but I wasn’t expecting a complete gag story to close out a saga that was actually pretty compelling in its storytelling up to that point.
• An absurdly frustrating final boss did not juxtapose well with a campaign that had been, for the most part, the easiest of the bunch.
• Oh yeah, the card game. It’s fine, it has some interesting depth to it, but nothing compelled me to play it when the platforming is out there waiting. Biggest complaint about Joustus is that a multitude of the finite resource Medals are hidden inside this out-of-place addition.
• Sadly, the smallest amount of new music by far
Conclusion: All of the complaints have to be considered within the context that this is another completely free update to a game that’s approaching six years old, so all hats off to Yacht Club for this amazing gift that is Treasure Trove. That being said, King of Cards is probably my least favorite of the Shovel Knight campaigns and the least likely one I would replay. However, I would have still paid something like $20 for it if it hadn’t been given away.
