Game Review: Shovel Knight

Imagine the perfect NES game. A game with the tight controls and world map of Super Mario Brothers III, the variable weapon choices and themed bosses of Mega Man, the item design of Castlevania, and the bounding pogo jumps and treasure hunting of Duck Tales. Imagine that it could be made for modern systems and wouldn't be bound by NES limitations like four-color sprites and no independent background scrolling. And then realize you don't have to imagine it, because the game I'm talking about is right there in the subject line and I'm not fooling anyone here.

I've known Shovel Knight was great for a long time since basically every review is blasting praise around like it's a game of Splatoon, but I have enough of a backlog that I wasn't willing to buy it until I found a sale on it, and that wasn't until around a month ago. And of course as soon as I started playing it I wondered why I had waited so long because this game is amazing.

This, uh, isn't going to be an impartial review.

I've seen plenty of these screens before.

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