Shovel Knight Dig leans on its lineage while managing to carve out a niche of its own. Although the core gameplay can be fun and addictive, some problematic design choices, bugs, and a lack of meaningful long-term progression prevent Shovel Knight Dig from being great.

An indie darling from nearly a decade ago, the original Shovel Knight's success spawned a host of DLC, a fighting game called Shovel Knight Showdown, and even a puzzle game. Shovel Knight Dig is the franchise's latest entry, turning the series to a subgenre into which it had yet to venture: rogue-likes.

The titular Knight awakens violently one night as his camp is destroyed, and an enormous hole appears where it once was. Just like that, players are thrust into the game, plummeting down on a mission to get back the Knight's coveted bag of treasure.

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The largest difference the game has with most others in the Shovel Knight series is immediately apparent: rather than a classic side-scrolling adventure, this game has the player moving ever downward. Enemies and environmental objects impede the way, secrets and treasure rooms lure players off to the side, but momentum presses players down. Not to mention the giant, deadly Omega Saw that constantly pursues the Knight.

The game is separated into biomes, each with three stages capped off by a boss fight. Players will progress through a total of 4 biomes in a normal playthrough, and are prompted at the end of each stage to choose one of two paths. These paths are adorned with signs, offering information on what will be found on the chosen route - a surplus of a certain type of enemy, an extra speedy Omega Saw, or an item vendor, for example. Regardless of which path is taken, each route is guaranteed to present the knight with a variety of monsters and environmental obstacles, like spikes or flamethrowers, as well as lots of side passages, either marked with a lantern or hidden.

Players will need to take these side passages if they hope to face off against the big bad, Drill Knight, who has taken Shovel Knight's treasure and excavated deep down under the earth to seek a treasure of their own. The side passages contain gems, helpful characters willing to give up an item, or various vendors selling healing items and upgrades. The gems are found not just in side passages, but everywhere in a level and are necessary for buying both in-run items and permanent unlocks, so players must decide which is the priority.

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Players will need a lot of gems if they hope to unlock everything. There are accessories that appear throughout a run, but those first need to be purchased from a vendor top-side, and the price steadily increases as more are bought. The Shovel Knight's armor can be swapped out, but first blueprints for each must be found throughout the levels, and then they must all be purchased for anywhere between 6,000 to 20,000 gems. The knight can pick up and carry a few items with them during a run and his carrying capacity can be improved with increasingly expensive bag upgrades, capping out at 10,000 gems. Suffice it to say that players will need to dedicate some significant time to farming gems if they hope to get all the goodies.

Unfortunately, it's not always money well spent. The accessories can be very situationally useful, but the ballooning costs make them pretty low on the priority list. As for the armor, they all have their own pros and cons, but one set was by far the best for survivability, making most others less feasible.

The most disappointing part of the unlockables is that players can't use them in any type of build synergy, nor do they contribute to a sense of overall progression, a big part of great rogue-likes, like the unique and meaningful progression in Hades for example. For one thing, there simply aren't enough upgrades to allow for too much experimentation, and none had any features that worked well off other abilities, discouraging any intentional or creative builds. Aside from the armor, there is nothing players choose at the outset of a run, making it heavily random which upgrades or accessories players will have access to, further limiting variety. Ultimately, the lack of player agency Shovel Knight offers in terms of load-outs works against it and contradicts tried-and-true rogue-like design.

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Aside from build potential, a game like Shovel Knight Dig lives and dies by how the moment-to-moment gameplay feels, and the constant momentum and pressure the players are under makes having tight control and fair consequences extra vital in this case. For the most part, the game succeeds here. It's absolutely tough, even frustratingly so at times, and some may hit a wall. But any rogue-like worth its salt slowly molds gamers until the challenges that once seemed next to impossible become second nature. Shovel knight Dig does well in this respect, especially when it comes to boss encounters. The first boss, Spore Knight, may feel like mayhem upon the first encounter, but before long, clear strategies reveal themselves and it becomes much simpler.

When players are in a level proper, however, the sensation of having progressed through understanding and skill is not quite the same. Players will have gotten better, but there are so many variables at play that one can't expect to rest on their laurels even in the opening stages. The randomized rogue-like design means stage layout and enemy placement are always changing and keeping levels interesting, but there are some things that feel less like fun challenges and more like flaws. As the Knight is constantly moving downward, there's only so much players can see below them. This means that occasionally they'll land on something deadly that they couldn't have prepared for.

Similarly, the camera is fixed on the horizontal axis and players are unable to see or move to the side past a certain point, accepting of course the aforementioned side passages. Certain types of enemies will come from off-screen where they can't be seen and if players are unlucky enough to be positioned next to the wall at that time, they'll take damage that couldn't have been avoided. Instances like this make an otherwise tough-but-fair game feel frustrating, and at times more in the hands of the procedural generation gods than player skill. Moments like this don't happen all the time, but taking a couple of hits like this at the wrong time can really send a run spiraling, especially when, at the best of times, every jump or attack players make has to be carefully executed if they hope to survive.

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Aside from those frustrations, the game's level design is a high point. Each of the biomes is distinct and features its own unique mechanics and enemies. In some cases, monsters will interact with the environment in fun and surprising ways. In the Smeltworks, for example, some enemies can set fire to the ground the knight is digging through, adding some extra urgency as players scramble to escape the encroaching flames. A water level features wheels that need to be turned by allowing a stream to flow into them and opening a passage. Each area has something new, and traversal mechanics will change between the three stages of a biome as well. Even after many runs, the level design still feels fresh and exciting.

Unfortunately, a few bugs plague Shovel Knight Dig in its current state: soft locks, frame-rate drops, and the very occasional crash interrupt the fun. Frame-rate problems in particular can cause unexpected danger for the knight, putting a run in peril. These bugs aren't rampant, however, and hopefully the developers tend to them soon.

The core gameplay of Shovel Knight Dig is solid, and the level design is a lot of fun, but the lack of build options, unfair-feeling deaths, and bothersome bugs hold it back. Perhaps with a few improvements to Shovel Knight Dig it can stand shoulder to shoulder with its predecessors. Ultimately, however, it's not quite there yet.

Shovel Knight Dig is out now for Apple Arcade, Nintendo Switch and PC. Game Rant was provided an Apple Arcade code for this review.

SHOVEL KNIGHT
Shovel Knight

An indie game from Yacht Club Games with a charming retro-arcade design, Shovel Knight is a 2D platformer where players control the shovel-wielding knight on an epic adventure through an 8-bit world. The full version of the game features additional characters and alternate game modes for even more retro-arcade goodness.