Shovel Knight

Finally had a little bit of time to play a game recently so I decided to start Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove on the Switch. It turned out to be a pretty charming game. Hearkens back to some Mega Man action/abilities/(Knights instead of Mans). It adds a bit of RPG to it as well..sort of reminiscent of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link~ish in towns and Super Mario Bros. 3 in world map.

You can make the game easier or harder depending on how much stuff you want to find and upgrade. When upgrading your character, I found the game to be pretty easy, but it was relaxing as I was able to finish the entire normal story in a single sitting. After finishing, it unlocks more modes of play and has New Game Plus which did seem to make the game a little harder. The music is fun as it's similar to those old 8 bit Mega Man games. I think they even got the original Mega Man composer to make some music for it...Minami Matsumae...though looks like that's only in the DLC.

I haven't played with the other modes as I don't know if I'll have time soon, but I did find this game to be fun. If you enjoy Mega Man games or similar platforming games, you'll probably like Shovel Knight at least somewhat.

It's easy to colour the Knight as a pastiche to the 8-bit era, which is true enough. At first I thought it very lazy to take the pogo-jump from DuckTales and create a game (world) around it. But now I think it's very much its own thing. The other playable Knights make all the difference. That's the point where they didn't hommage, but created their own entries and where it all shines. Playing Specter is vastly different. I had some trouble playing Plaquey at first. Once in the groove at chucking bombs for air time, I couldn't get enough. And that's just the default option.
Another point is that for a straight platformer it has cute narritive, and even characters, so much that of course, you can and will skip all this, but it is very much charming and even humoures. Heads and shoulders above all the myriad of rip-offs of bygone days.

Yes, pogo move from Ducktails haha. I am now surprised that I did not get stuck in the snow whilst pogoing...but then again, I guess it is a shovel. I enjoyed learning the boss patterns, though nothing was too tough. Was neat to see some had a defense for that pogo attack.

And thanks, good to know on the other characters, I will try their playthroughs before trying challenge mode and NG+. What ultimately tipped the scale to try this one was the fact that the main character uses a shovel, seemed goofy enough that I would at least enjoy that aspect...that and the fact that I’m a sucker for platformers like these.