Final Knight feels like Castle Crashers meets MapleStory. This roguelike beat-em-up tasks you to gather a party, go out on epic quests, defeat great monsters, and gather legendary loot. With excellent pixel art and a focus on the aspects that appeal most to fans of “fantasy adventuring party”-type games and stories, Final Knight has much to offer, but you might find yourself a bit confused when you first get into it.
The art style is the first thing I want to touch on with Final Knight. Pixel art is something I am more or less thrilled to see in my games. We’re coming to an era where game design is becoming more accessible and easier for newer developers, which opens the door for more artists to showcase their skills in an industry that otherwise would be harder for them to step into. While this leads to a lot of games with great traditional art, it’s also had a specifically impactful effect on pixel art games, and it seems that each new pixelated game that comes across my desk continues the pattern of wowing me with its visuals.
Final Knight still looks phenomenal while taking a more simplistic approach to its look than some other titles. In fact, it looks all the better for doing so, taking a classic visual style and presenting it with its own flair. The pixel art style of Final Knight reminds me of MapleStory, AdventureQuest, and other fantasy MMORPGs of the mid-2000s that dominated my childhood. It’s a nostalgic look that reminds me of these predecessors without taking too much, maintaining a unique and modern look of its own.
As mentioned earlier, Final Knight combines roguelike and beat-em-up mechanics to form its core gameplay loop.
Your typical “match” of Final Knight will begin in the game’s hub world, where you can customize your party (more on that later) and select a quest. This quest has the ultimate goal of defeating one of the game’s bosses, and setting out on the quest will put you on a procedurally generated roguelike map, moving through several stages with different enemies and rewards at the end of each, eventually coming face to face with the quest’s boss at the end. Along the way, you will find gear, discover temporary party members, and gain XP, with the ultimate prize coming once you defeat the boss at the end. Afterward, you return home, appreciate and equip your spoils, and do it all over again.
Final Knight features a pretty interesting party system, where your party is made up of four characters of different classes and subclasses, each capable of wielding their own unique weapons, having their own attack patterns, and wielding four unique abilities which can be swapped for one different choice on each one. You play as one of these characters at a time, with AI taking control of the others, with the ability to swap between one additional character during combat and give commands to the rest of your party. Your party can be freely moved around in the list order and given different default position orders to strategize your gameplay.
Beyond the class and party system, I will say that the combat in Final Knight is pretty basic, to a fault. I made the comparison to Castle Crashers, and that’s a pretty good metric for imagining the game’s combat. An encounter consists of button-mash beat-em-up combat, with a few abilities per character, and definitely switching things up a bit. However, I feel as though these abilities don’t feel quite so impactful in most cases. For some characters, you end up only using one or two abilities in an encounter, with the others feeling pretty unimpactful or uninteresting to use. Other abilities have more nuanced uses, with stuns and taunts, but rarely feel as useful as they might be, and I personally ended up using them only occasionally if everything else was on cooldown or if I simply didn’t know what else to do.
The biggest drawback to Final Knight is honestly that the game can be a bit tough to understand and a tad overstimulating with its sheer depth of information.
Final Knight bombards players with a significant amount of information. Like, a lot. For each of your party’s four characters, you have different stats, abilities, and pieces of gear for each available slot, as well as party-wide status effects and modifiers, health and energy levels, etc. All of this information is displayed to you all at once.
A single look at the game’s UI might be enough for some players to understand why this might be a bit daunting, especially when it is presented to you all at once with little direction as to which UI element means what. What you do not see here are the various submenus presented within the menus, with navigating even further becoming something of a task. On top of this, you also have to handle processing the information on each new piece of gear, upgrade, or new party member encountered along the way. While you may learn to skim these elements over time, it is certainly a lot all at once.
That being said, I kind of like Final Knight for all of the information it has all at once. While it could certainly be presented a bit better, all of the status increases, special modifiers from gear, and power-ups gathered along the way embody the spirit of what makes “Adventure Party” media fun. The desire to push ahead, gather new gear to improve your party, and build an incredibly specialized approach to the monsters ahead is exactly what we look for in games like this. For that, Final Knight absolutely goes above and beyond.
Final Knight may be a bit clunky with its UI and basic with its beat-em-up gameplay, but it delivers on the fantasy of a party-building adventure game perfectly. If optimizing builds and the promise of strong loot compels you to venture into the lair of dangerous monsters, Final Knight is the game for you.
Pros:
- Party-building gameplay with a focus on optimizing builds and collecting strong loot.
- A lot of replayability with its roguelike structure.
Cons:
- Simplistic beat-em-up combat.
- Cluttered, hard-to-read UI and insufficient tutorials make the game difficult to pick up.
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