3/5 ★ – beemancer's review of Shovel Knight: Shovel of Hope.

It's easy to see why Shovel Knight gets a lot of love. This is a game that wants to be nostalgic, and it does so mostly successfully. The game looks great and I love the characters, and the music is fantastic. The game is appropriately difficult, never feeling unbeatable and it is generous with checkpoints. However, some of the places it chose to be nostalgic ended up being major setbacks, as well. The places where the game was challenging didn't really feel fair - I mostly died to extremely janky platforming mechanics. The later levels especially are full of all your least favorite tropes - ice, wind, auto-scrollers, and bad spike hitboxes. For example, there's a lot of places with spike floors level with the normal ground so you can touch it with your pinky toe and die. Bonking into low ceilings and dying for it was a common occurrence as well. Which isn't to say that's not what happens in Mega Man, but it's annoying to die to it. The end of the game was also full of slow sections at the beginning of checkpoints that had to be repeated on each death. You begin the game with 3 health, which is really 6, and that made the enemies feel like real threats. However, even playing casually, by the midpoint of the game I've got 8 (16) health and 2 chalices that full heal me. This made my health bar feel irrelevant throughout most of the game. I only ever died to damage if I reached multiple checkpoints without healing or dying to a fall first. The only threat is instant death mechanics - lava, spikes, and pits, which starts to feel cheap pretty quickly. Enemies serve the sole purpose of trying to knock you into the pits. The later bosses exploit this extensively. I'm just not worried about running out of health, but if the bosses make spikes or holes you can bet they also are going to try to push you into them, because that's the only way you'll die. One boss that I won't spoil took me 30 minutes to an hour of having the floor removed from under me to beat. It's a shame this balance shifted so drastically, because the early levels were very fun because the enemies were genuine threats, but going from 3 health to effectively 30 was too much of a zenkai boost for the engine to handle. I feel this is easy to fix, increase enemy damage or reduce the amount of health ups and get rid of some of the cheap kills. The boss fights were mostly good outside of the overused instant kill mechanics. I didn't particularly like being melee, though. A lot of the bosses are very mobile and your default attack has no range. It's annoying to hit enemies without getting hit in return. There's a good variety of magic attacks you can access, but frankly none of them feel new. Even considering this game is from 2014, the anchor is just Castlevania axes and the green orb is bubble lead from Mega Man 2. There's an air dash and a platform you can ride, etc. Nothing felt like a new idea here, but there is a good variety. Overall, the game leaned too hard into nostalgia for this to be a winner for me. It's a shame the end of the game felt a lot more frustrating than the start, because that left a bad taste in my mouth. This game had a winning formula and just had a few sequences that brought it down for me.