2.5/5 ★ – HotHeadJared's review of The Plucky Squire.

The Plucky Squire Played on: PC Time to beat: 8 hours Completion: 100% The Plucky Squire is one of the more disappointing games I have played this year. Not because it didn't meet some high expectations, but because it seems to throw 90% of its creativity into its style, leaving some other aspects fairly barren. To start with the positives: yes this game is gorgeous and the mixing of the realistic 3D and the 2D storybook art styles make for a truly unique atmosphere. The animations, character designs, soundtrack, and emphasis on the importance of the arts all are really wonderful and emphasize that there is quite a bit of creative juice in this game. However, this is where a lot of the creativity tends to end. The actual gameplay and combat leave a lot to be desired. They give you some agency with a few different moves, but ultimately none of the enemies really take anything more than an occasional roll and basic swings with an upgraded sword. The combat is broken up with puzzles, and while the novelty of them initially won me over, by the end, they hadn't really expanded upon the original idea enough to keep me fully engaged. The gameplay is broken up even further with minigames, which essentially put our main heroes into different genres to either defeat a boss or complete a challenge. Shooters, RPGs, boxing games, rhythm games, and even a bubble shooter game make an appearance, and while none of them are bad, none of them do anything particularly interesting either. I lastly want to mention the amount of technical errors I had. It wasn't the most broken game in the world, but I had a few hard crashes and multiple soft locks/glitches arise. I normally do not care too much, but in a game that was occasionally as slow-paced as this, and one that I wasn't having a ton of fun with, they bothered me a bit more than normal. Ultimately, I am happy that I checked the Plucky Squire out, and I hope the studio chooses to expand and learn from this game, and make something even more creative next.