KNIGHT CRAWLERS: The Dungeon Crawling Review.

Are you a Rogue-lite fan? I’ll be honest and say I am not, more in that I am not very good at them and the constant restarting gets to me after a while. Yet I have found something to give me a bit of fun in Knight Crawlers a new title from Good Morning Games and published by The Iterative Collective.

Knight Crawlers is a new dungeon crawler with some interesting ideas behind it. Taking control of your crawler you instantly realise it is a little wobbly, well down right drunk it looks. This is all part of its charm though with being a physics based rogue lite with elements of action RPG thrown in for good measure. Each room that you crawl through has traps within to trip you up and points from which you spawn in your enemies, so if you choose to go and get all the furniture out of the way or work out the best way to move around the layout of the room before taking on enemies it is completely up to you.

Combat feels a little strange and took me some time to get used too. Specifically, the time taken between being able to swing your weapon had me dying plenty early on though once you get into a rhythm of swing, jump and swing again you quickly get the feel for what you need to do. Just watch out for those hazards around the map. After a certain number of enemies are defeated, you can move onto the next room to repeat the process again.

Aiding you in your journey are powerful skill cards to help build into your play style and enchanted equipment available to pick up and add to your crawler. Ranged attacks are currently set to automatically fire when you’re standing still and give another element for you to work into getting through those hordes when they are ganging up on you. Upgrading your skills and items are essential in beating back the undead hordes and do take some time to build into your own play preference. 

Visually Knight Crawlers is a cute cartoon style of game not out to break any systems. Dungeons feel dark and gloomy as a dungeon should be but well lit, one complaint is you can disappear behind a wall which can make for a frustrating death but something you learn quickly. The Sanctuary where you launch each run from is a happy place with other characters to help you on your way. The cards are beautifully artistic, worthy of a stand-alone card game deck.

Thankfully gameplay is intuitive enough that you can work out what is going on relatively quickly as it doesn’t hold your hand. While intuitive controls need to be a bit tighter as everything felt a little slow to begin with for this sort of style. Maybe that is what Good Morning Games are going for I am not sure, but the style of movement coupled with the slower strike rate early on brought my frustrations to the surface very quickly almost resulting in a shelving. I am glad I stuck with it as the speed can be upgraded but only slightly changed the affect it had on me. 

Overall Knight Crawlers is a good title from a solo dev. You have the opportunity to make it as hard as you want it to be by spawning in more enemies at once or take your time through it. It is visually well designed with so much happening on screen later in your playthrough that you won’t know where to look.

You can play through the entire realm relatively quickly though if you’re a fan of building your character type and love the rouge grind there is plenty of option there for you.

Knight Crawlers is out now on steam. Be sure to give it a look and keep an eye out for some gameplay over on our YouTube channel.