Shovel Knight Reviews
Shovel Knight lovingly recreates the simple pleasures of 8-bit platformers and improves on them with modern ideas that make every level different and worth playing.
One of the best retro homages of recent years, that cleverly combines the best elements of older 2D games with plenty of new ideas of its own.
Many games try to use nostalgia to lure you in, but few of them are as well-made as Shovel Knight.
Shovel Knight is everything good about a bygone era, acting as a reminder of why classic platformers were so loved... and hated.
The original game remains untouched and is still as challenging and addicting as ever, but consumers looking for something new won't find it here. The game's throwback sound and graphics look fantastic on the PS4 and the Xbox One, but obviously a game built around the 8-bit aesthetic doesn't benefit from a current-gen remake the way something like The Last of Us or Grand Theft Auto 5 is able to.
Still, it's so very refreshing to find a true gem in the ever-expanding rockpile of retro-influenced games, and Shovel Knight is a wonderful love letter to some of the classics that many of us grew up with. You will dig it.
The game is still recommended for those who love platform games strongly focused on action and with a hint of puzzles.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Shovel Knight lacks the courage to dare, but, despite this, achieves his goal and pays homage to the 8-bit era.
Review in Italian | Read full review
A difficult, fun, and fitting tribute to a simpler time, Shovel Knight can't quite dig its way to becoming an all-time great.
There is gold in these old genres, and Shovel Knight is a successful dig.
Shovel Knight recalls, but doesn't rely on, many greats from gaming's past, but lacks the inventive spark that could have elevated it to classic territory.
A fun action platformer that remains incredibly frustrating by taking a few too many cues from Castlevania's jerkiest moments, Shovel Knight is satisfying and infuriating in equal measure. It's also a damn fine callback to the days of yore in a world where callbacks are a dime a dozen, and rarely this well done.
Shovel Knight is a pretty stellar homage to simpler times, but it's so unabashedly an homage that it never steps out of the shadows cast by the components it's built from—DuckTales, Mega Man, Simon's Quest. And while derivative doesn't necessarily mean bad—far from it in Shovel Knight's case—it certainly doesn't make it any less pandering in a lot of ways.
Shovel Knight was fun for a while, but it didn't do enough to keep my interest the whole way through. A very good old school platformer that doesn't do enough to earn a place in modern gaming. If you're feeling particularly nostalgic, go ahead, otherwise you might want to play something a bit more ambitious.
I only made such strong comparisons because Shovel Knight is very blatantly borrowing from Mega Man and Castlevania. The formulas for those games work so perfectly well for a reason, and while I am not saying that it is wrong to try and innovate on them, Shovel Knight could have, perhaps, found a better way to do so.
Because it's the perfect five-hour play session.
The game also sings because it's never a slave to the perceived merits of tradition. It would have been all too easy to, say, shove in some little floating Shovel Knight heads, making you collect pointless extra lives for no reason other than that's how things were done back in the good old days. Yacht Club Games is smarter than that, and their game is, too.
It's rare that a developer can not only capture the magic of 8-bit classics, but improve upon them, but Shovel Knight does exactly that. This game is a true classic, and hopefully the first of many more to come from Yacht Club Games. Bravo.
Shovel Knight is quite possibly the best faux-NES game I've ever played.