Ever since Hades cracked the egg and spilt the yolk on how awesome rogue-lites could be, studios the world over have been hopping on to the play, progress, die, repeat bandwagon. Call me an egg-sucker if you want to, but I’m not complaining. I really enjoy the genre. Perhaps it was Aaliyah and Busta Rhymes that instilled it into me, but “If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try again. You can dust it off and try again, try again.”
Knight Crawlers is a physics-based, dungeon-crawling RPG Rogue-lite, where you battle minions and monsters and your own janky physics. The game looked exciting enough for me to give it a crawl and, well, let’s find out if my knees survived.
Developed by a solo developer over the last five years, Knight Crawlers is as indie, as indie can be. It has voxel-style 3D graphics and a humourous take on dungeon crawling. Tonnes and tonnes of items, runes, gear and pick-ups, that seem to have procedurally generated stats and a “card” style progression system that shows off some art generated by Mid Journey.
On my first login, the game warned me that I should definitely, one hundred per cent, use a controller, I ignored this warning. I mean, it’s a PC game, and it should work with the default PC peripherals.
Do not ignore this warning; the key binds are weird, almost like when you had to play two-player games on one keyboard back in the 90s. I immediately grabbed my controller, plugged it in, found out it didn’t work and then had to go and beg the NAG team for one that did.
Once I did have a controller, though, the game really began to shine. I no longer had to worry about my fingers getting entangled with each other on the keyboard, and I could just run around, swinging my beat stick, slaying enemies.
UPDATE: Since my original playthrough, the developer has added an update to remap the keys on the keyboard. This will make playing without a keyboard a much better experience; however, I still highly recommend playing with a controller.
Furthermore, without much more than “You’re a crawler, go and kill things” as a story, the game didn’t really have much of a pull. Yes, I did enjoy running in, calling waves of monsters as big as I could handle and swinging for the rafters, but once I’d done that a few times, it kind of started to feel all the same. There is that element of variety with different powers generated as you level up in the dungeon, but it didn’t feel like it affected the game too much.
It was here that the game fell into a personal favourite category of mine. A quick arcade game that I would play, to kill half an hour or so. And luckily enough, I had a hand-held device to play around with. This game plays just right on the Asus ROG Ally, not for any other reason than I would only need to kill 30 minutes or so when Loadshedding had kicked in, and I had somehow managed to finish doing all my chores before the power came back. While I had power and was sitting in front of my PC, I would pick something else to play.
Knight Crawlers is fun when you’re looking for something easy and at times satisfying, to play, but it quickly lost my interest, and I started shifting from playing to something else on my list. You can tell that the solo developer has put a lot of work into the game but one thing is for sure; it’s not a bad game; it’s just missing that “X factor” for me.