I like the game, but the 3rd boss is bugged. It just keeps walking and blocking and that is it.
Reviews for "Specter Knight"
I did enjoy the graphical content, the gameplay, the amount of upgrades and mobs but the game is way too easy if you choose to focus on magic.
Also the third boss is bugged (he keep walking on me without attacking me and blocking all my attacks)
UknownXL responds:
Thanks for the feedback!
Liked the art style, the gameplay, and the amount of mobs/upgrades. However, the game itself is seriously lacking either playtesting or normal game design. Let me be more specific...
1. Game is obscenely easy. I've never upgraded health, and had no serious problems because of it. Yeah, I've died a few times, yes, but that was only because I've got too reckless, not because the game is hard or anything. One of the reasons for this is...
2. ...Magic simply wrecks faces. Seriously. I've chosen nothing but magic on levelups, and never had any serious problems with anything - when firebolt becomes spammable, it is usually enough to one/two-hit anything.
3. Bosses are pushovers. Their attacks are extremely easy to avoid, and they die on first-second vulnerability phase. See points 1 and 2, again.
4. Many upgrades are useless. Specifically - +keys upgrade and +potions upgrade. Also, sword upgrades and all these blocking/charging skills are borderline useless, because they are too awkward to use and not even remotely as effective as magic.
5. Earth Summon is the most useless spell. Its damage/speed is extremely low, its vision radius is obscenely short, and it almost never aggroes anything. In other words, it offers nothing to be even remotely useful.
6. Healing spell is too powerful and makes all these potions redundant in 95% of cases.
7. Giving any spells unlimited range, unaffected by line of vision is just like giving the player a "press X to win" button.
8. Monsters are very passive. These snakes seemed to do nothing but ignore me, even up close - probably a bug.
9. The levelups bonuses need some kind of rebalancing or at least some incentive to not put everything into a single stat.
UknownXL responds:
Thank you for the review. Were looking into all of this.
This game is... I don't know what to make of it. Yeah, great, procedural level generation... that's always fun, save for the inevitable backtrack you end up doing any time you get a key and wonder if whatever's behind that locked door is worth anything. Spoiler: 90% of the time, it's not... unless you happen to have no other way to progress, like what I experienced when my first time on Level 10 greeted me with a shopkeeper, a chest and a locked door. Most times, the locked doors just contain treasure that you can pick up from any monster... and two potions, more often than not.
Speaking of keys and potions, I want to move onto another point: many of the upgrades you're going to want to buy... are worthless. There is almost nothing on the 'Equipment' screen of the shop that you will want to buy... except the EXP Boost; the Gem Boost; the Boots / Movement Speed (which, while almost negligible, still helps a little bit against certain later enemies); and, in the later levels, the Armor Bonus. You will make literally no use out of any other ability or enhancement on that screen, and that includes the Key and Potion Drop Increases since enemies will always drop a number of keys equal to the number of locked doors on the floor... even if there's one enemy left and three locked doors, that enemy WILL drop three keys... and if you have those keys, locked doors contain chests more often than not that will contain one or two free potions that each restore 50 HP on use, which makes the upgrade to increase potion drops from monsters useless so long as you can dodge easily enough. What you're going to want to upgrade are Spells on the next page of the shop... don't believe me?
My Level 35 character with twenty-four points invested in Strength and max Attack Bonus from the shop dealt about 170 damage per slash, which is a modest amount...
...with a fully invested Charge Attack, that number actually did not increase! I was still doing about 170 damage on Charge Attacks, and I had to expend a block because enemies would attack me during the charge sequence...
...but ten points in Magic with a fully upgraded Earth Drop? 300 DAMAGE... not only was that enough to OHKO most enemies throughout the lower levels of the game, I could cast it every five seconds, it would track enemies' movements so it NEVER MISSED, and it hit enemies that weren't even on the screen! For a spell you can get as early as Level 4 of your playthrough, that's pretty fucking amazing... but when your main method of attack is 'stand in the doorway and press the corresponding hotkey every five seconds', the game goes from really fun to tediously boring. Seriously, if you want to go easy-mode on this game, spec in nothing but Magic; you don't even NEED Strength as long as you can dodge, and I never saw a need to even touch the Health upgrade, especially when the Healing Light spell (at Rank 2) would instantly heal back ALL 150 POINTS OF MY HEALTH. And when you get to Level 10 Magic, you get access to skills like Rain Flame / Hail Storm which are basically the same thing as Earth Drop, minus tracking and can hit up to five enemies on-screen at a time. Earth Vortex is another amazing spell because, like Earth Drop, it has no maximum range and constantly does damage up to five times on the same enemy... and with Earth spells' ability to "curse" monsters, you can potentially do double damage to it with your next attacks. "You cursed the enemy? Drop a boulder on its head for 600 damage!"
That's not to say all magic is good, though. Your starting spells are kinda crappy, to be honest, but maybe I'm just spoiled by Earth Drop. They do good enough damage to start, but the fact that they just slowly travel in a straight line towards the nearest enemy means that using these spells at any range farther than point-blank is going to result in a miss and a five-second cooldown... and god forbid trying to hit faster enemies like Goheds, Skeleton Spiders and Biters. The Bomb skill is the worst offender of them all: it's the only "spell" you have that you have that actually consumes any resource, and while it moves towards its target faster than the Fireball or Ice Shard spells... it's a bomb. It only detonates and deals damage after a certain amount of time and will sometimes over-shoot enemies that you throw it at, which means enemies will pass right over the bomb and not get hurt by it at all. Light Beam's a decent spell with its ability to bounce between targets, but the linear movement on that is sort of a mood killer as well since many late-game enemies move much faster than in the early game. You get three more spells that are essentially "novas", attacks that fire out in all directions, but they're uncontrollable and only good for if you need a horde of enemies to stop nibbling on you from all angles; I personally never saw a use for them. The only other spell I haven't talked about yet is the Earth Summon, which... honestly, for a Level 10 Spell, is really crappy. By the time you get it, most of the monsters are going to hit a lot harder and your skeleton is going to be really weak; at Rank 1, I think my skeleton survived three hits. At subsequent ranks, its HP was approximately tripled each time, but the cost of upgrading it as well as its 120-second cooldown heavily outweigh its usefulness as a free-to-summon second party member. In fact, skeletons are so useless that they don't even serve as a proper distraction against bosses... they won't attack, and the boss AI won't bother to be fooled by them being in the room and still only target you. I'll get back to these guys in a minute, but there's a much more pressing matter I wanna talk about.
Once you get to around Floor 10, you're going to meet a fun little fellow called "The Haunted", a surly-looking blue ghost. GET READY TO FUCKING HATE HIM. If you are in his line of sight as soon as you enter a room, be prepared to be paralyzed for about three seconds by its ear-piercing screech... and if there are any other monsters in the immediate vicinity (and there will be, believe you me), they will proceed to either shoot you with heavily-damaging projectiles or headbutt you to death in that short time frame. The only way I have found to make these enemies a non-issue is to fire off Rain Flame or Hail Storm as soon as you enter the room, killing off anything you can immediately see; if something still lives, cast the other AoE spell in your arsenal, then focus on using Earth Drop against The Haunted after the fact...
...oh, and speaking of terrible enemies, the third boss: Rizon, the Dweller Lord has the buggiest AI I've ever seen. Here's a tip: DO NOT SUMMON SKELETONS AGAINST HIM. Remember how I said skeletons serve almost no purpose against bosses? Turns out that skeletons serve a NEGATIVE purpose against Rizon: I summoned one to try and distract him (since it was the first time I had gotten that spell and wanted to use it), and Rizon and the skeleton just had a little shoving contest in the middle of the room while the boss continues to hock loogies at me that failed to reach the corner I nestled in. He remained invincible against both spells and melee attacks in the meantime, and when I approached him, he wouldn't even swipe at me with his arms as he normally would. I had to reset the game and start again from Level 9 in order to get back to him and fight him properly.
So that's my experience with Specter Knight (not to be confused with the boss of the same name from Shovel Knight): tedious, buggy, and beaten in just over an hour despite the creator's boast of "5+ Hours of Game Play". In fact, I think I spent more time writing this review than I did actually playing the game for the most part. So to summarize for any new players:
- put your points into Magic after every level;
- get the Earth Drop and Earth Vortex spells ASAP;
- invest in EXP Boost, Gem Boost and Movement Speed;
- get all the good Level 10 spells (that is to say, everything EXCEPT Earth Summon); and
- breeze through the game because nothing's ever gonna get close to you.
...I'm dead serious. After getting Earth Drop and Healing Light, I never touched the Spacebar to defend for the rest of the game. You can evade every attack in the game with enough attention, and your melee attacks are comparatively garbage even at ludicrously high levels of Strength.
UknownXL responds:
Thanks for the review. The dweller lord issue has been addressed and should be fixed. You have brought up alot of good points and we are genuinely sorry that you did not enjoy the experience and had so many issues. We will see what we can do about addressing them.
I'm having a different issue with the dweller boss. I summoned a skeleton thinking it would help fight the boss, but it just runs into the boss and now the boss just stands there spitting at me. The boss no longer chases me and I can stand out of the spit range.
UknownXL responds:
Thanks for the review. The issue should be corrected.