Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeons Switch Review – Match and Attack Your Way To Victory

Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeons doesn’t exactly play like a typical game from the Shovel Knight franchise. Instead of a 2D platformer, Pocket Dungeons plays as a top down, block falling, puzzle game, with rogue-like elements. So, although it’s not your standard platform leaping, enemy pogoing adventure, Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeons takes this beloved helmeted hero and creates a whole cool new game.

Well, does Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon worthy of thy shovel? Or does this adventure need to dig its own grave?

The premise of Pocket Dungeons is that Shovel Knight has been sucked into a cube of puzzles and now must escape. At the start of the game, you’re offered two options of play. Either rouge-like mode, where every time you die in a level you return to the beginning of the game until you can eventually unlock a cannon that fires you back to the level you were on, or you can go for puzzle mode, where dying just respawns you in the same level exactly where you left off… but if you allow the items to fill the screen, you restart the game, again until the cannon is unlocked.

Although the game looks a little like a Candy Crush wannabe, it’s actually pretty different. Instead of matching identical enemies, you defeat them with your shovel. You can defeat enemies on their own, but if there’s a chain of identical enemies, they’ll all take damage at the same time when you hit them.

However, every time you hit an enemy, they hit back, causing you to lose some of your health, so you have to keep an eye on your life and keep collecting potions to avoid dying.

Pocket Dungeons requires you to complete ten standard levels, and also some of the bosses from the main games. Defeating a boss allows you to play as that character and use their own unique special abilities, so if you don’t get all the bosses on your first play through, that’s an incentive to go back and play again.

Since either dying or having the screen fill up, depending on the mode you’re playing in, causes you to replay the game, Pocket Dungeons is more focused on forcing you to replay the same levels again and again rather than giving you lots of new ones, which was a bit of a let down for me.

Throughout your playthroughs of Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeons, you can also buy relics. Although some of these relics are useful, most just feel like a bit of a waste of space and didn’t really make a massive difference to my runs. Gems for buying relics can be acquired by defeating enemies.

The faster you defeat said enemies, the quicker your gem meter will fill up, therefore playing quickly has rewards, but there is always the danger that you’ll accidentally bump against an enemy you don’t have the HP to deal with.

Something Pocket Dungeons does absolutely excel at is its adorable pixel art. Bold colours and cool designs made the enemies exciting to look at and the levels more interesting to play. The soundtrack also resonates with all the glory of its predecessors, with most of the tracks actually being remixes of original Shovel Knight tunes.

There’s also a couple of cool extra options besides the 10-level main adventure. There’s a daily challenge, that gives you one opportunity per day to try and set a new high score with a character and also a really fun cooperative mode. These two extras allow you to keep enjoying the game for a while even after finishing it.

Overall, Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeons is an excellently crafted game. It takes traditional block falling and rogue-like elements and mixes them into an exciting new concept with the help of some classic Shovel Knight magic.

Although doing the same levels over and over can feel repetitive, and the relics aren’t all that helpful, it’s carried over with bold, colourful pixel art, a fantastic soundtrack, and all the unique charm we’d expect from a game in the Shovel Knight universe.

For shovelry!

Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeons Switch Review provided by Nintendo Link
Publisher: Yacht Club Games
Developer: Yacht Club Games, Vine
Release Date: December 13th, 2021
Price: $19.99, £17.99, €19.99
Game Size: 338 MB