

- #Shovel knight pocket dungeon multiplayer how to#
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- #Shovel knight pocket dungeon multiplayer series#
You use your gathered gems to purchase Relics that will then become available out in the field, and you can usually purchase one Relic upgrade per stage. On top of this foundation, the game introduces its rogue-lite dungeon crawler elements. Part of the joy of a run is often discovering a new boss and knowing that defeating them will bring them back to your camp so you can play with their new powers. King Knight can perform a powerful shoulder-charge from a distance, at the expense of his own health.


Spectre Knight, meanwhile, actually loses HP when he drinks restorative potions, but regains life by defeating enemies. Tinker Knight, for example, is more vulnerable than Shovel Knight with lower HP, but he can use the metal pieces he gathers from a stage to temporarily build a super-powerful mech suit that rips through enemies. Seeing how their action-game abilities have been transmogrified into this new genre concept is always a thrill, and they introduce wildly different ways to play. The game unlocks various other knights from the Order of No Quarter, each with their own powers. While Shovel Knight is the star and lead character, he's far from the only one. When you find items lying around the world, they're immediately recognizable with short, pithy descriptions to cue you in on their functions. The fiendish simplicity of the mechanics starts to iterate on itself as you encounter new enemy types with special properties, like growing much stronger in groups or vanishing after the first strike until you hit something else. Yacht Club and Vine have done a masterful job of meticulously introducing how all of the pieces fit together so naturally that you hardly notice how much you've learned after the first handful of times playing. If all that makes Pocket Dungeon sound overwhelming, don't worry in practice it's anything but. Essentially, it's a puzzle game that feels like an action game.
#Shovel knight pocket dungeon multiplayer series#
Both you and your enemies have a series of tick-marks to signify your HP. Enemies move whenever you move, but a timer ticks down and then they'll move independently as well. You're often looking to eliminate large groups of enemies at a time, but you can just as easily take out single enemies to clear a path or create space for a larger clump. You ram yourself into enemies to eliminate them, which means your own movement around the grid is a large part of the strategy. It's a tile-matching puzzle game, but rather than a cursor, your character is its own tile on the board. Especially when you have to restart the entire game every time that happens.Right from the start, Pocket Dungeon's core mechanics defy easy categorization. The crash when you're fighting the shrine guardian isn't so bad because you can prevent it from occurring if you know how (don't kill him with an attack that would also kill you) but I've also had random crashes during the last level and that's just unacceptable. There are no story differences regardless of who you're playing as and because there's so little dialogue from the Knights, I didn't feel like I was unlocking new characters, just different abilities.įinally, the switch version has an annoying tendency to crash at the worst times.
#Shovel knight pocket dungeon multiplayer how to#
There are so few NPCs that you could count them on both hands and most of them only tell you tips on how to play. It's missing the trademark Shovel Knight charm. Also, Shovel Knights ability sucks to the point where Polar Knights ability is just an unambiguously better version of it. Having to ignore the things that are supposed to make each playthrough varied and fun in order to win is not good game design. I found that once I started ignoring half of the relics and only got the good ones, my win rate spiked dramatically. Only a couple levels have unique gimmicks and you barely notice them when you're playing. They're all almost entirely the same except different enemies.
