Here’s My Secret Sauce for Success in Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon 2021.

Explore the Pocket Dungeon with Shovel Knight in an action-packed puzzle adventure mashup unlike any other. Join your mysterious guide Puzzle Knight as you slog through hordes of enemies, acquire new gear, and combat both old and new bosses. In Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, you may explore a story with unlimited twists and turns, journey as your favorite heroes, and even challenge a friend to a fast-paced head-to-head competition.

Despite being a great Shovel Knight fan, we were hesitant to take this up because of some of the unfavorable reviews. We’re not sure where they’re coming from after roughly 3.5 hours of gameplay. We believe it is a matter of personal preference. This is a puzzle game with characteristics of the modern Roguelike genre. It’s random, and it can be unfair at times, but we don’t believe it’s as unfair as others would have you believe (though we don’t want to dismiss anyone’s experience with it), and we believe that’s because it has a rather high skill ceiling. It is, once again, first and foremost, a puzzle game.

Enemies and blocks fall to the ground and stay there (with a few exceptions; some travel a little faster for various reasons), and you can go wherever on the board. It’s up to you to assemble these strewn-together parts into chains. Because hitting enemies causes you to take damage, you’ll want to eliminate as many as you can at once to keep the board from filling up. Because you heal by hitting potions, you should avoid chaining too many of them together; if all of your potions are connected, you’ll have fewer to use in an emergency.

Each enemy acts in a unique way. One may have two hit points and only deal one damage (meaning you only take one damage to destroy a chain of them because death-strikes aren’t retaliated against), and one may have three hit points and deal two damage (meaning you’ll need to replenish your health in between strikes if you’re low on health). Later foes behave in a variety of ways, such as dealing more damage in chains (incentivizing you to hit them individually), going from one damage to three damage if you’re low on health, and so on.

You begin with an empty wallet, and the larger the chain becomes, the more gems you receive. You can spend these gems in shops that appear on a regular basis to purchase enhancements for this particular run. Perhaps an extra point of damage against lone enemies, or resistance to electricity, or something similar. There isn’t a lot of diversity, but it’s more than enough to keep things interesting. We’d argue that too much diversity would dilute the item pool and make things less enjoyable, but who knows because that isn’t the point of the game. There are also treasure boxes and keys to be found. These drop consumable goods might be either active magical effects or automatic buffs of some type.

In our perspective, the characters also play very differently. However, because We’d prefer to keep this review brief, We won’t go into detail about their mechanics. We also don’t want to bring up the “talent ceiling” issue again. The game will occasionally throw pieces at you in bizarre combinations. It just happens, yet most of the time we can see where we went wrong before we pass away. Playing too quickly, becoming stuck, and making poor trades. There are some pretty cool ways to make chains that come with having a physical figure on the board. You can use your body as a component to prop up a chain, and you can also activate chains in the air as pieces pass by. We’re sure there are more brilliant methods out there; these are simply two that stood out to us in very little time with the game.

In a nutshell, the game is incredibly intriguing, with enough diversity to keep you interested while remaining short enough to entice you to play “just one more round.” But it’s first and primarily a puzzle game. A puzzle game in the form of an arcade game. You won’t enjoy this if you don’t enjoy that type of game. If you like Puyo Puyo, Tetris, or other similar puzzle games, you’ll enjoy this.

Click here to check out our recent review on Slice Of Sea.