Man, what a surprise. Shovel Knight is a fantastic game. It is a gift that keeps on giving. The colorful 8-bit era inspired visuals are great, there's a fantastic soundtrack that's also reminiscent of that time period, it's fun and replayable as hell as each and every level is very memorable and there's a really well implemented NG+ mode that makes replaying the game a blast but still feel varied and challenging and the game's difficulty is handled very well. Now it's nothing that hasn't been done before by other platformers from the NES era but Shovel Knight takes all the best parts of those games and blends them up into one fantastic package with the addition of some great new mechanics that weren't achievable back then due to technical limitations, and with the addition of the free Plague Knight and Specter of Torment campaigns thrown into the mix with a third extra campaign on the way titled King of Cards how could you not see the value in this game? My only issue is the Lich Yard level and Specter Knight boss fight in the main campaign. This level is not okay. According to some Reddit posts, this is considered by the community to be one of the hardest levels in the entire game, yet it's the second or third level you play depending on your choosing. Last time I got this frustrated at a video game was when I attempted to play Sonic Free Riders with Kinect on the Xbox 360. There was a really dumb decision made to have half the level be shrouded in complete darkness and have lightning strike every so often illuminating the room for only a split second. Someone, please explain to me how I'm supposed to play a platformer in complete darkness. Oh, wait you can't. By either a miracle or sheer luck I somehow managed to pass the main sections and get on to the boss fight and he wouldn't nearly be as bad if it weren't for a couple of his moves being complete bs and the fact that once you've gotten him down to just a few hits shy of death he proceeds to make the entire boss room pitch black like previously seen in the level without the lightning strikes. This was an enormous difficulty spike and I'm no platforming veteran and Shovel Knight isn't even the hardest platformer I've ever played but there is absolutely no excuse for this level, at least not that early in the game. Other than that I found the rest of the game and the other two soon to be three campaigns which perfectly build upon the base games with new mechanics and takes on the main story that makes them feel entirely fresh and new to be an absolute joy to play through and I highly recommend it.
