It’s been several months since I’ve been off the World of WarCrack. I’m glad I left, but it’s left an emptiness within me and makes my brain itch. That’s when my Brother introduced me to Spiral Knights, A free to play game made by Three Rings Studios.
Being a fan of Ian Mcconville of MacHall and 3PS fame, I instantly recognized art style. Everything seems so cute and innocent, with a little bit of dark humor. It harkens back to the golden age of the SNES era. Super deformed characters romping about killing foes and collecting treasure.
Spiral Knights has many similarities to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. You can go around slashing your sword around or you can charge up for a massive attack. Some swords will even allow you to do a 360 spin with your swords out, much like Link would after charging his sword for an attack. You can also get bombs that will explode in your enemies face. You collect hearts to replenish your health and you can lift pots and throw them at enemies or switches. Sadly the iconic boomerang and the hookshot are absent from this game. For ranged attacks we have guns.
I gotta have more explosions
Guns break away from the SNES era of gaming in a significant way. You can’t use them effectively with a controller. It requires mouse to aim, or else you would have to line yourself horizontally or vertically to your target, with diagonal aiming requiring you to move diagonal direction and firing like you had to in LoZ:LttP, if it even allowed it. If you avoid using guns then playing on a controller is possible. With swords you always want to strike in the direction you are moving and you don’t really aim while deploying bombs. However, even if you avoid using guns, aiming comes in use when you throw status effect potions at your enemies or throwing pots to trigger that switch. In this way Spiral Knights feels like many flash games such as Portal The Flash Version, Elephant Quest or even Bang! Heroes
The Levels are a kind of dungeon crawl where you go from room to room and make your way to the exit. Each dungeon gate has 3 tiers of difficulty, requiring a certain level of gear to be allowed to lower tiers. And, each tier has 2 stratus which give the level within that stratum elemental/thematic characteristics. The characteristics are determined during an 8 day period where players find minerals in their adventures, and put them into a dormant gates. This randomization helps keep the game from going stale by presenting different situations and combination of enemies.
I don't care about what levels show up, I want my crowns.
Occasionally, a stratum may experience a power distortion during gate creation. these distortions represent boss levels, and are usually put there by the developers. Currently there are 4 bosses; Snarbolax, Royal Jelly, Roarmulus Twins and Lord Vanaduke. The levels always have the same layout each time you go to them, but as a result tend to have more devious traps for the newbie.
The boss fights are also fun and interesting. And if there is a gimmick in the fight, usually the levels designed prior to the boss will help you familiarize with the different elements within the fight. For example, Snarbolax requires you to ring a bell as when he gets near it. Through out Gloaming Woods, you have many opportunities to use the bell in fights with normal enemies and how it effects them.
Defeating these bosses gets you massive loot as well as a few seal tokens. These tokens can be used to upgrade your gear or help you develop alternate sets for dungeons. One popular weapon is the Sealed Sword that can be bought with Jelly Gem tokens. This sort of item currency is a popular way in MMOs recently to help players get the loot they want for the kind of character they want to build. It’s also worth noting that there are other tokens in the game as well. The ones you can get from treasure boxes often can be used to purchase trinkets and hard to obtain crafting materials.
One thing I haven’t touch on yet, but is big part of the game is energy. Energy helps you do things in this world. To go down to the next level in a dungeon costs 10 energy. To craft items requires energy, and the higher star level(rank) the item the more energy required. Every player can accumulate mist energy. It’s maxed out at 100 energy and can fully refill after a 24 hour period. So in a day you can only go down 10 levels or craft gear as high 2 star levels. If you want to play more or craft higher star level gear, you have to purchase crystal energy. Crystal energy can be bought with your cold hard cash. It’s how the developers make their money. However, there is a market for energy in the game that allows players to guy energy with the other in game currency called crowns, which you get from defeating enemies and breaking treasure boxes. You can also buy them from Three Rings Studio, which is how the developers get paid. These exchanges are pretty much player driven, and go up and down depending on player demand and scarcity of energy. So you can do everything in the game a person who paid for it does, but you’ll have to “grind” for it. which to some is not a bad thing.
Looks like energy is up today, moving the Dow up 200 points
I really like this Micro payment system for several reasons. It doesn’t make me commit to the game if I don’t want to. When I run out of Mist Energy, (a good 1-2 hours of fun) I can pay to play more or do something productive. Generally speaking you’ll have a lot of younger players that have limit time to play and some adults who want to spend more time with a fun game resulting in a more mature atmosphere when grouping in dungeons and less 12 yr old squabbling.
Overall a good game, I’d like to see it develop. I haven’t mentioned the PvP side of the game. So, if Zelda is your thing, you should try out Spiral Knights. you can play from their site or you can download it from Steam