Fallen Knight | PC Review
Fallen Knight is certainly a game. It’s a game that presents itself as a Mega Man X type action platformer, and that much is true. Watching the trailer, one might get the impression this is a game put together with care and polish, a game meant to evoke Zero in Mega Man X4 as he slices and dices his way through hordes of robot enemies. The second part of that, at least, was attempted. The care and polish was not.
The Good, The Bad, and the More Bad
Before we begin the sharing of grievances, Fallen Knight was made by Fair Play Studios and is currently out on PC. It offers up various action platforming stages with bosses at the end and defeating said bosses allows you to acquire new moves and abilities. It is not a good game.
It’s hard to enumerate all that’s wrong with Fallen Knight. There are a lot of little things, like the script having typos and the story being largely nonsensical (and the story being a little thing because who cares about the story in an MMX game?) There’s the lack of customization options, like not being able to adjust resolution, music and effects volume (you either have it on or off), and the weird decision to make the right face button the default ‘accept’ button rather than the bottom button. I could go on…
…and I will. There are the inconsistencies in level design, like bottomless pits taking away only a pip of health while lava kills you outright. There are the boss battles in which you either slog through the boss’s ocean of health normally, or undergo the trial-and-error of learning their parry timings to disarm them. It feels like the developers were trying to implement cool systems, but the execution was lacking. But that’s not the real problem with this game.
Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen
If you’re going to make an action platformer, controls need to be precise. That’s something everyone can agree on, because imprecise controls make for an awkward and frustrating experience.
Fallen Knight is an awkward and frustrating experience. There’s ghosting in the inputs. If you hold down a direction for about a second and then release the button, you keep going in that direction. That is not okay. In an action platformer, you should move when you want to move and stop when you want to stop. It should be precise; exact. In Fallen Knight, it is not.
Similarly, the wall jumping (or wall-running, to be precise, since you just automatically run up walls when you jump toward them) feels clunky and not nearly smooth enough. Rather than being seamless with cool parkour-esque stunts, it just feels like you’re juttering your way around.
Fallen Knight Final Verdict
Even if the controls were perfect, all the other issues, small and large alike, add up to a game that isn’t worth your time or money. There are better games in the genre out there, and Fallen Knight is too far removed from them to be worthwhile.
If you’re a fan of Mega Man X action platformers, I would instead recommend 20XX and its sequel 30XX, along with Smelter, which did a much, much better job of taking inspiration from Mega Man X to create something original and fun.
This review is based on a PC copy of Fallen Knight provided by PQube for coverage purposes. It is also available on PlayStation and Xbox.
Fallen Knight
$14.99
Pros
- Decent Amount of Unlockables and Challenge Tasks
Cons
- Bad Controls
- Boring Levels
- Inconsistent Mechanics
- Janky Parry System
