Knightling review

(backup copy of the Steam review)

tl;dr: A fun but flawed open-world platformer with some nice movement tech. Not really worth the full asking price (30 USD), but well worth what I paid for it (8 USD).

The Good

• Movement controls are reasonable (on a controller) and teching is both possible and fun, though somewhat tricky to pull off.
• The art is colorful and about what you'd expect from an indie Unreal/Unity 3D title that's not using art as the USP.
• Combat can be a bit dull at first, but improves as you unlock moves. And if you still don't like it (or it's too difficult), there's an "immortal" mode and easy mode doesn't lock off achievements.
• Finally, while the plot twist was predictable, it was still enjoyable and played well into the "people with power are terrible" theme.

The Bad

• It's blatantly unfinished: They finished the main quest and fleshed out the first area, but each later area only has 2-3 side quests. The part that annoyed me the most is that one quest has you gathering feedback from the citizens about the queen, but there's never any follow-up.
• It's lacking consistency polish: Saving/reloading can break things, the camera freaks out occasionally, and movement glitching is common.
• It's lacking performance polish: I rarely experienced slowdowns, but I'm playing on a fairly powerful PC. As other reviews have pointed out, FPS tanks on any mildly-complicated scene.

Refutation of the Bad

All 3 of the above points are indicative of an indie team rushing to get a game out before they run out of funding. So it's remarkable how well put-together this game is considering the flaws. There's a complete plot, gameplay works reasonably well, and I never encountered any game-stopping bugs (one crash, but that's to be expected these days). Unlike so much Early Access slop out there, Knightling is actually a game, and Twirlbound should be congratulated on getting that much done.

Conclusion

I can't really recommend it at full price, but it's definitely worth picking up on sale. For the content available, I'd say it's worth a good 15-20 USD. I'm giving it a 5/7: a good example of the genre and it brings a bit of novelty to the table.