Shovel Knight is a very capable platforming adventure, and manages to hit a nice medium of nostalgia for the 8-bit days, but keeps the flavor of originality.  Where the game truly shines is the aesthetics.  The graphics are beautiful, the art direction fanciful and the music is superb.  However, Shovel Knight is also a game that left me wanting more; more levels, more enemies, and more story.  

Everything about this title is competent.  The platforming felt smooth, Shovel Knight moved along the maps at a steady pace, and nothing was moving at a pace I couldn’t keep up with.  Aside from the standard run and jump, Shovel Knight’s platforming revolves around the use of the shovel.  A downward strike over an enemy can give the Shovel Knight a boost, while digging into sand blocks and certain walls breaks through them. Every level is built upon utilizing these skills. 

While the levels themselves are straight forward, they hide secrets which you must literally dig up.  These secret nooks and crannies often contain a trunk-load of gold and gems, but sometimes, a keen-eye will reward Shovel Knight with a new relic, or a new piece of sheet music.  Some walls are marked, but many are not, prompting the player to explore every inch of the level.  The incentive to finding these items goes beyond just a sense of completion; sheet music sells for 500 gold each, while the relics give Shovel Knight another weapon to add to his arsenal.  Each relic has its own use for platforming and combat, but some relics will be utilized far more than others.

The platforming puzzles based around relics are especially challenging and creative, but they are confined to only a few levels. They ended far too soon, and I found myself wanting much more.  Encounters with the wandering knights also felt incomplete.  Each of the characters have dialogue, and some seem to play at a deeper involvement in the game, but we never see them again until the end-credits sequence, leaving those plot points unfulfilled.

Each level carries it’s own identity, each adding a unique element not found in the others, keeping the experience fresh.  Each level also has mini bosses which takes a page out of the classic Mega Man series.  Checkpoints are placed throughout each level, and they are placed far enough apart to give some challenge, but not too far where the player has to dread retreading most of the level.

Most of the fights with the Order of No Quarter are imaginative, but some of them do boil down to wailing on them with your shovel until they go down.  The boss fights each have a unique identity, with the two-phase battle with Tinker Knight standing out as especially fun and dynamic.  The biggest complaint I have comes from the excessive amount of shaking some of the knights produced from their attacks.  At a couple of points, I had to pause the game to take a breather.

Shovel Knight is completely free of any sudden difficulty spikes, so expect a smooth ride throughout the entire experience.  Health-restoring food appears periodically throughout levels, so there was never a period where I became desperate for health.  Shovel Knight has no lives-system, so death comes at the price of gold instead.  The more gold you have when you fall, the more is lost at your untimely end.  Shovel Knight is not unforgiving, as you can reclaim the lost gold by traveling back to where you perished.  

If you need extra help, you can always visit the Troupple King (It’s a trout-apple hybrid).  Once you get a chalice, you can fill it up with one of three potions: one that refills health, one for invincibility, and one that attracts nearby treasure to you.  Oddly, the potions cost nothing, and you can refill any time you visit.  Since you can carry two chalices at a time, the troupple potions can really take the challenge away, so I suggest you steer clear unless you are really desperate for help.  Troupples can also be found in certain pits throughout boards where you can fish them out.  Again, there is no price for these potions, you just need an empty chalice. 

For anyone looking for more of a challenge, Shovel Knight has created a risk-reward system from their checkpoints.  Checkpoints can be destroyed, rewarding the player with a large amount of gems, but a death will send them farther back in the level.  Unfortunately, once I bought everything I could, that system lost all meaning to me, and the only reason to break a checkpoint was simply for the challenge.  Further challenge can be found in Shovel Knight’s New Game Plus Mode, where enemies hit twice as hard and all food is replaced with bombs.

An important element of Shovel Knight lies in the innumerable amount of gems littering each of the boards.  Every level is filled with hidden areas to dig up, each hiding away thousands of gold and gems.  Even after hours of playing, collecting thousands and thousands of gems felt extremely satisfying.  The drawback of all my excess funds came when I ran out of merchandise to buy in the latter half of the game.  Once Shovel Knight was fully upgraded, and all of the relics were purchased, grabbing all of those gems seemed to lose all meaning. 

As the game progresses, Shovel Knight can purchase upgrades for his health, magic, armor, and his own shovel.  After each health and magic upgrade, the price increases to the point where you can’t completely upgrade Shovel Knight after the first two levels of the game, but you also won’t find yourself grinding away for hours to get sufficient funds.  Shovel upgrades consist of new techniques, and can lend some excitement to the game’s combat.  Sadly, the same cannot be said of the armor upgrades.  Each armor set has its own features but none of them, save for the silver armor, felt of any use.  Some armor, like the magic armor that increases your MP, but lowers your defense, was more of a hinderance than any kind of benefit.

  Shovel Knight also puts the Wii U Gamepad to work by not only having off-TV play, but by giving players quick access to relics and ability to post to the MiiVerse.  This element does help set the Wii U version apart from it’s 3DS and steam counterparts, and shows what can be done when designing with the Gamepad in mind.

There’s a lot of polish in Shovel Knight.  The visuals, the audio, the level design: they are all skillfully crafted.  However, the game is not without its flaws.  Too few levels revolving around relics, and the lack of closure with the wandering fighters are some of the larger blemishes in this game, but they are small complaints when looking at quality of the game as a whole.  I feel like the experience ended too soon, with completion clocking in at around six hours, but this is far preferable to games that resort to pointless padding to artificially extend the experience.   Yacht Club Games is off to a strong start with their first title together, and I cannot wait to see what the company puts together next.