Spiral Knights
Description: Spiral Knights Spiral Knights is an action MMORPG developed by both Three Rings Design and Sega. As the title may suggest you play the role of a Knight whose objective is to reach the bottom of the Clockworks, which is a huge dungeon with selected levels that are randomly chosen. Every few days or so a zone is removed and replaced with a new one.
It is a basic setup and it works rather well, however theres one huge problem I have with Spiral Knights, and I cant continue any further into the review until I address it. That problem is, simply put: Spiral Knights is a Pay to Play game wearing the disguise of a Free to play one. What does this mean? Allow me to explain.
To do anything in Spiral knights, anything you require a substance known as Energy. Energy can be bought either with Crowns, the currency used in Spiral Knights or with real money. At this point youre probably thinking oh, well you can buy Energy with in game money, whats the problem with that? The energy is actually sold by other players who bought it with actual cash, and then auctioned off. This makes it incredibly difficult for new players to quickly get up to higher levels, unless they're willing to pay. It costs energy to go to dungeons to make money, and the best way to make money then is to sell materials you get. At this point you will be thinking well, great! I will go get some materials and sell them off and get more energy! then you realize that no one ever buys materials unless they are incredibly rare ones you can not obtain. This is the point where most people will probably stop playing, but theres more!
As soon as you start you have 100 mist, mist is exactly the same as energy but stored in a different spot. Mist recharges over time (It takes about a day to get back to 100 energy after using it all) This is the part where you say well, I will just stick to mist and play sparingly then you realize that mist is capped at 100 and you need more than 100 energy to do anything. This means you will have to buy energy at one point or another. 2 star equipment takes 50 energy and 400 crowns to create, not including the money you need to buy the manual and the time it takes to buy or find the materials. 3 star equipment costs 200 energy and 1000 crowns. 5 star equipment costs 5000 crowns and 800 energy.
As of this review the price to buy energy with crowns is 6,200. Lets just say you already have 100 mist on you, you still need to buy 700 energy. This means you actually need to pay about 48400 crowns for that piece of armour. Then you realize that you have to make the helmet, shield and weapon too. That brings it up to round about 160200 crowns, and thats not including buying the manuals or materials, which would boost it up much, much higher. In total this is 3200 energy for a five star set of equipment.
At this point if you dont even want to play anymore I would understand, but that's not to say that Spiral Knights doesnt have good things about it. The game play is absolutely fantastic, especially if you play it with three other friends, the enemies are all very nicely varied, the game is also quite challenging even if you know what you are doing. It costs 10 energy to go down a floor in the clockworks; there are three floors between every break. When you reach a break there will be a merchant and some healing stations, this merchant is generally the only way to get rarer manuals, which are randomly selected to be in the shop. So it costs 30 energy every time you want to make a trip to the manual merchant.
I am sorry that I am going on and on about the energy system, but its a huge part of the game and because of its current incredibly high price I really can not see any newbie being able to get into the game, I could barely afford to buy energy when it was 3000 crowns, never mind 6000.
At the end of the day, all Spiral Knights really has going for it is the gameplay, which is only good if you dont lag in the slightest. Honestly the energy system is a good enough and big enough reason for most people to stay away from this game, and I really do not blame any of them.
Played: 2,903
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