Thursday, August 1, 2019

Dan’s Weekly Switch Review Week 2- Hollow Knight

Last week I posted my review of Octopath Traveler and someone suggested I do another one for Hollow Knight as well, considering it’s one of my highest played games on the switch right now and for good reason. Hollow Knight is a unique take on Metroidvania like titles where as you play you’ll get new attacks or abilities that allow you to go to places previously inaccessible combined with Dark Souls with a lot of critical movement and dodging during fights as a major factor on if you live or die. Prepare to die a lot let’s start.

Players: 1 Difficulty: 8-10 Rating: 9

Pros: Tons of content more so than a lot of AAA games I’ve played, Deep story telling and in game lore, unique combat system that’s engaging and ever changing as you earn new abilities and charms and upgrades, tons of enemies and bosses, the audio itself is phenomenal from ambiance to background music and the critter noises, the art style is beautiful and each area feels vastly different than the last, tons of side content on top of the main story, bar areas or places that require a certain ability to get to you have fairly free control of the order you visit places or do things, character design is impressive and varies between cute and horrifying.

Cons: It can be so easy to get lost in this game without taking a charm you can’t see your current position on the map so you need to keep very close track to your map and pull it out a lot to get around without it, some of the platforming is downright rage inducing and the mantis claw and dash can easily get you killed over and over on something, there’s no weapon variety you get a nail and upgrades to it felt like they could’ve added more other than charms to change things up more, the game is supposedly very rough on your joysticks, overly convoluted fast travel systems that use trams/giant skag beetle/elavators that are easily confusing some areas are named differently than their map name, checkpoints can be far and in between in some areas and can lead to a lot of frustrating back tracking for your geodes.

Personal summary: Hollow Knight is a game that will probably be remembered as one of the gold standards of indie games in our time, I’m not a fan of Metroidvania type games but this one is addicting and I found myself losing hours at a time just running around trying to kill things and find secrets. I found the insect enemies to be intimidating and the controls and “pogo” mechanics took me some time to fully get adjusted to it took a lot of trial and error dying to bosses and enemies and areas to get a good grasp on the best way to survive. I’d say if you get over the steep learning curves this game throws at you that you’ll truly enjoy the challenges it brings. I found myself lost for the first time after the completing the 3rd area and decided to just take the charm that gives me the position I’m currently in on the map with me at all times. Decided to kill every single innocent ghost in the spirit graveyard(I’m a monster I know) and tackled almost every single side boss before tackling the ending almost entirely fully stacked on health and spirit. I found the interactions between our main hero and the other creatures in the world to be satisfying but felt somewhat empty without your main character speaking back or giving you an option with any dialogue (He doesn’t talk at all) The replay value is pretty high I’ve gone and beaten it twice now for two of the I believe 3 endings you get and I’m going for my speedrun attempt now.

Final Verdict: Buy or at least rent this game it’s super cheap and worth far more than it’s selling price. If anyone has any suggestion of next weeks review my current other games that are at 100+ hours are Smash Ultimate, Stardew Valley, Binding of Isaac, Mario Kart 8 and Enter the Gungeon.



Submitted August 02, 2019 at 06:30AM by LocusAintBad https://ift.tt/2T1cNmR

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