Prima di cominciare a giocare con questo gioco ho letto gran parte delle recensioni e sono stata spinta a provarlo.
Non c'è scelta migliore che potessi fare, non riesco a smettere di giocare, è veramente una droga.
La grafica è veramente ben fatta e simpaticissima per gli amanti del genere cartoon, inoltre veramente coloratissima.
Il gameplay è molto intuitivo, le missioni sono del genere "ammazza tutto e tutti e arriva alla fine del percorso", tutte diverse tra loro e sopratutto divertenti. Non sempre facilissime, a volte c'è anche da pensarci un po su!
Il craft è un'altra cosa molto interessante, tutta da scoprire.
Un'altra cosa importante, per diventare forti e andare bene avanti NON c'è bisogno di spendere moneta vera, perchè quella interna del gioco serve praticamente a tutto!!
Che altro dire, consiglio vivamente questo gioco, per essere gratis è veramente grandioso!!

This little onlinegame was once a really good one. It had a really nice developer team with friendly gamemasters, a community which was always fun to have a chat with. Regular content updates with bug fixes, where the developers often listened to feedback. New game modes, new levels... but: these times are all over, and I must WARN you about this game.

It started with the acquisition by Sega at the end of 2011. The guys at Three Rings said, there won't be any changes because of this. It was the first lie, because of Sega, there were suddenly EU servers. Although this was positive, everything went VERY slowly downhill since this. I'm not going to cover much gameplay elements, because these are available in other reviews.

A few weeks later in November 2011, they have released a content update with recycled boss levels, which are very same, but only harder. What's the catch? Per level, you needed a "shadow key", and it was findable as a 1% drop in lockboxes, something where you had to spend 2$/€/whatever to open one (if you wanted to of course). For a 1% chance. The community responded by a massive protest, saying that everyone should boycott this. Especially because the developers never did such a rip-off before. One week later, the shadow keys were available for "a limited time", for an energy price of 1800, something around more than 6$. The following weeks they were permanently added for purchase. This was not to be the first money try controlled by Sega.

The next "big" thing was in 2012 a new boss level added as a DLC, for purchase with a 7$ fee. Once again many community members were upset about this, since they had released in 2011 three whole boss and many other levels for free. Although you may say, "but they need to earn money too!", you may be right, but this was abused by an increasing money greed by Sega, slowly completely ruining the future and meaning of the game. I will shorten the next events in 2012: After several other cash grab attempts, the most hilarious attempt happened at the end of 2012. It was the guild hall update, and seriously EVERYTHING was overexpensive. Only people with 24 hour free time, farming the same repetitive levels 100 times per day, or 3 - 4 digit number wallets had the pleasure to burn their cash, or better said, to customize your own guild hall.

Meanwhile, Sega had found out that people don't like DLCs. They like costumes! Which means, the development for all other stuff like from their view pointless things like content updates are completely throttled, and costumes were released and updated regulary, sometimes several times in a month. Usually one costume box was available for "free" if you purchased energy for more than 20$. Later these boxes were available for energy as well, but on the same real-money level.

In December 2012, Three Rings had announced the Battle Sprites, little pets which are a nice help in a battle, but not really necessary. The community was hyped. 7 months later, in July 2013, they had finally released the Battle Sprites. What happened in the meantime? Nothing at all, only tons of cash promos with even more costumes. Please note, most costumes aren't something new. They were simple reskins, a cheap color change. Even a 12 year old could achieve this in programs like Paint.net or Gimp with a few clicks. More about these Battle Sprites: If you get your first one for free, the Sprite is level 1, and completely useless. You can level it up until level 100, but this will take a develish amount of time, if you aren't planing to level it up the rest of your life. Here grins the cash grab again: There were plently of purchaseable items to speed up the progress. Veteran players which had a lot of minerals and materials by previous level missions had the best chances to avoid the cash grab as good as possible on their way to level the poor Sprite up to level 100. And there are the next things to facepalm about:

The Battle Sprites are completely unbalanced. The Dragon, which was meant to be an offensive Sprite, is ridiculously weak. The half-offensive-defensive Ghost Sprite has more offensive powers and damage.

Even the defensive Cat Sprite is better than the Dragon, because the skill "Heart Attack" makes it much easier for you to spam your own attacks, if there are heart pickups everywhere. Major balance problems like this aren't fixed; it's still the same today! And there are no signs that they care about this, or the developers are not allowed to care about it. Gameplay bugs, glitches or balance problems have a pathetic high chance to be completely ignored at all, which wasn't the case in 2011. Today they will only issue an emergency patch when one of their cash "promos" stuff has a little texture bug, glitch, or whatever. It became very obvious that it's all about new cash stuff and costumes now, and many veteran members have left the game because of this situation. This online game has too little content to live without content updates, these were an important reason for many people to stay. And since these people have left the game, there are now only these left which think the current situation is perfectly okay and everything is great. Which is another problem:

While you had in 2011 a lot of people free for an adventure or a chat, this is today only partially the case anymore. Many people have developed their own closed-circle-connections in their guilds, like to talk or blaspheme about other people, because of boredom or whatever reasons (I can confirm this with the German community, English could be different). Since there are no new content updates anymore, except one or two simple short missions in ONE year, some people stay there for Social Engineering. The game supports Steam trading, where you could trade energy for games, items from other online games items or more. Which is very attractive for some people. But I have kept the best to the last:

In early months of 2014, someone has hacked the game, and has duplicated items in auctionhouse or had gifted them to other people (as far as I could see it on the forums before it got censored away). They have banned almost everyone who has purchased or accepted such duplicated items in the auctionhouse or via trade, and how are we and other people supposed to see if a virtual item is actually "real" or not (since when are virtual items real anyway?). A friend of mine got such items via a trade, and he gave me some to me and a few guildmates too, because free things are always good, isn't it? From their view obviously not. Many others, including me, got banned in a massive ban wave, with hundreds of other people, and they absolutely don't care about it, nor my massive amount of playtime or invested money. I had contacted their support, which said, "We require a healthy mind from every player", refusing to take off the ban, and indirectly saying I'm a liar. But they´re the liars they already knew about that bug for weeks and didn´t fix it.

Their gamemaster staff became like "brainwashed", handling situations for their profit. In 2011 they have never thought about crazy things like a massive ban wave, just because one bad guy set a fire in the game (metaphorical). It was a time where they have cared about their people very intensively, if people were actually happy about the game progress. And it's all over. No active content development, no mature and friendly community anymore, no new things, no hope at all. This game is for every interested gamer a hopeless case now if you want to play it for a long time. Because Sega treats Spiral Knights like a cashcow, milking it's milk til it's blood and bones. No wonder why one of their lead designers called Nick left Three Rings this year. It was once a very promising and great game, until Sega came in. I could extend this long text even more, but I will stop now.

Thanks for reading!

Sezioni	Recensione	Punteggio
Grafica	3D stile Cartoon, un accoppiata davvero vincente per questa tipologia di giochi	9/10
Storia	La presenza di una storia vera e propria in questo gioco non c'è, esiste più che altro un insieme di obiettivi. Volendo valutare dunque questi si può dire con certezza che sono ben bilanciati a seconda del rank in cui ci si trova.	6/10
Giocabilità	Per quanto riguarda la giocabilità è fliuda e instancabile. Il giocatore è sempre stimolato e motivato a salire di livello, a migliorare le proprie prestazioni, armi, armatura e perfino l'animaletto da combattimento di cui si è equipaggiati. Il coinvolgimento è molto alto, tanto da far rimanere chi è davanti allo schermo a giocare per interi mesi! Tuttavia ci sono alcuni lati negativi che non mi sono piaciuti come ad esempio le ambientazioni e i nemici che si ripetono. Proprio così, nonostante il vostro livello salga e con questo anche quello dei vostri nemici, l'aspetto di questi rimarrà esattamente uguale così come le mappe dove vi troverete a combattere, tutto ciò a lungo andare diventa noioso. In aggiunta a ciò, vi è il fatto che per andare avanti, a meno che non si voglia passare ulteriore tempo per reperire oggetti davvero rari e difficili che servono a loro volta per fare materiali altrettanto non reperibili e difficili e così via, bisognerebbe pagare e "avvantaggiarsi" in un determinato senso del termine in alcune cose. Sono presenti infatti Corone (monete normali) e Energia (un poco viene data standard quando si comincia a giocare, dopo di che non viene più data), e indovinate quali delle due vi servirà per comprare oggetti che vi fanno tornare in vita? Quale vi permetterà di ottenere oggetti che servono per evolvere le vostre armi? E le vostre armature? MA OVVIAMENTE LA SECONDA! Prima o poi finirà e ve ne continuerà a servire dunque a meno che voi non vogliate farvi modalità Arcade all'inifinito per arrivare a 7000 corone e poi convertirle in 100 misera Energia, serviranno soldi reali.	8/10
Reperibilità	A giustificare però quest'ultimi punti c'è il fatto che Spiral Knights rimane un Free To Play per ogni sistema operativo, dunque chiunque può scaricarlo e giocarci.	10/10
Commento finale	Motivo per cui consiglio vivamente a tutti almeno di passarci qualche oretta prima di capire se vi possa piacere o meno, poi ovviamente ognuno ha i propri gusti dunque quella che per me è stata una bella esperienza per altri potrebbe essere negativa. Senza tralasciare che comunque essendo multiplayer potrete coinvolgere anche i vostri amici per farsi tutti assieme qualche risata. Presenza di Achievements e Carte.	33/40

Questo è il classico titolo dove screenshot e video di presentazione non rendono affatto la bellezza e il divertimento di questo gioco. Spiral Knights prende fin da subito e "diverte", cosa che non tutti i titoli del genere fanno.
Consigliatissimo!

As much as I love this game, and continue to play it, I do not reccomend that others play it. The game is nice sure, but it takes too long to progress, and many people (some of my friends included) are turned off this game because of the dismal rewards for completing anything in Spiral Knights. There has been no communication to players about any upcoming updates from the developers (last major update was twelve months ago) and it seems any updates now are just for cosmetic pay boxes, not gauranteed to give you anything worth your money, not to mention the gamebreaker gun recently added in a 'prize' box.

In short, this game would be better if they removed a few features, tweaked the Player Vs Player, released new content more frequently and made it easier for new comers to get geared up.

If I was writing this review 2 years ago I would say, "HELL YEAH! PLAY DIS SHIET!" but as time moved on there was a new update which gave the game a new overhaul of mechanics. For those who are unfamiliar you might not notice any difference, but back then there was an energy system that stopped players from playing or reviving in the dungeons when they ran out; this was known as the mist energy system. You were allowed up to have up to 100 mist each day which would be used for crafting, elevator fees to get to missions, and revives. As much as I complained about the old system to my friends, it still had a nice balance to the f2p model, since if you went into the dungeons others can help pay the fees and other players can revive teamates by giving them part of their health. This idea allowed for more cooperative play with others and made the community more nice. Even though some may argue the idea that restrcting time played was a bad thing, I think it was a good idea, especially considering that those who play games for hours on end eventually get bored of playing them. Think of how the horrible android and ios games keep others playing, because they don't tire out the game the whole day through charging towards beating it. Besides if you liked the game and wated to continue playing for as much as one wants you could support the devs and pay real life money for energy (ingame currency) for as low as 2 bucks!

Now to fast forward to today, the overhual update ripped the energy system which means no more elevator fees, good right? Well for that reason alone, yes, but as for what happens to the balancing I didn't think it was worth it. Now that you can play as much as you desire, the devs needed to add more artificial time which creates the lovely mmo sin of grinding. Grinding is a standard for many f2p mmo's but this game takes it to a new extreme. If you weren't a vanguard (the highest level in the game) before the update then you would most likely never reach that feat without sacrificing your time away for social life, friends, family, every other game, or even talking on the phone before you can possibly think to reach the next rank. (Yes most of that was exaggerated, but it is the slowest leveling process I have ever experienced to date.) For players who aren't badass vanguards with their awesome guild will most likely be spending their time grinding for months, the game looses its playability and gets boring and stale. Another major complaint is that revives can no happen by someone sacrificing health for others, nope! Instead they decided to go with another approach to balance the game for making profits, which is the sparks of life system. You NEED sparks of life in order to revives or wait as you team goes to the next floor. If you run out well too bad for you now go buys some more. I know someone will argue that you can buys some from the auction house, while yes that is true it also gives another reason to grind even more beside leveling and gear which you need in order to progress to the next rank.

Now to talk about pvp! Oh boy what to say...well if you aren't a vanguard with high level gear and an awesome team full of vanguards also with high quality gear, then you will always die in an unfair fight. The reason why this happens is because the matching system has the same algorithm system as christianmingle.com (no offense to christians of any sorts) and will pair you up against a team that out guns you the whole way, so no pvp unless you are high level with good gear and a good team of friends or a guild. This system was broken before and after the overhual update so that aspect would be a complaint either way.

Now we get to talk about content and updates, "oh goody, tehehehehe!" *Ahem* I don't exactly know who to point my finger at but I'm going to direct the blame towards Sega since publishers usually have more control over monotization and content updates than the actual developers. Sega I'm sorry to have to inform that, costumes and outfits don't count as extra content as those are asthetics that you only buy, thus the word monotise comes in. Content should be more updates to add to the game that will give it more play time and replayability not a cheap ploy and tactic to make more money besides the ludicrous sparks of life system. Now content in this game is just an expansion to the new minigame called "auction house madness" (yes I made that up) which means that if you want to get access to the new "content" well then go grind for three months to buy them from the auction house or just use your real life money to exchange it for ingame currency. I am not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you I once put $20 into this game when I returned to play with my friends and guess where most of the want to... yep you are most likely correct, a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ costume! I am ashamed of myself for not realizing what I fell for, and then I bought 20 sparks of life that I shared with my friends and our guild, to which we then ran out within the first week in order to not start over on the rediculous boss fights that we were not prepared for. I now hate Sega and I will never trust them with ANY game, period! Do NOT put any money into this game, I swear, I hate everything that the corrupt publishers in this industry stand for and ruining our favorite games. If you do spend money after reading this review then shame on you, you don't derserve to be viewed as a gamer as they would not stand for the ♥♥♥♥.

Now for a little story: Spiral Knights was once a love for me, she would give me happiness and give my friends and I something to do when we were seeking a game to play. I mean sure she would sometimes just sit there after a certain amount of time but I would usually repay her kindness in full to which she then spent more time with us before the day was over. Unfortunately, she now has suffers from a mental dissorder that her step father induced to fullfill his greedy needs. As much as I hated to, we left her and never looked back.

Now ending off after the cheesy story telling, I give this game a thumbs down with the side note of thanks Sega, you truely opened my eyes, now I know who lies behind the real ideas of what a gamer want and it defenitely wasn't you.

Don't tell anyone but... Free tf2 hat.

it's still worth playing, but poor decisions, lack of updates and further balancing (they balanced a few things but after the lead designer quit everything went down hill fast including an allready announced BIG update and balancing) will make it so that the game will get to grindy for your taste and/or boring REAL fast (grinding the same maps for more money) it's free so DO give it a shot and like me, keep hope the devs will redeem themselves and go back to the old ways and make this a realy great MMO

The lead designer left OOO and after that the game went from good to recycled and VERY grindy.
There was a big update announced while the LD was still at OOO but now still no news and the only "updates" the game gets is recycled/recolord costume pieces or just reskinned (end-game) weapons.

the game itself is fun, it used to be hard to progress but still was doable... now it will take you forever to just "forge" (will get back to this) equipment to progress and make it into the "end-game" stages (Tier 3 and onwards)

there used to be an energy system (it's still there... somewhat) that gave you 100 energy each day (would cost 10 energy to play a single map, X amount of energy to craft stuff, increasing amounts to resurect yourself...) at first i didn't like it (the early stages... you know, the time where you want to get to play as much as you can hehe) then they introduced elevator passes (free maps, so the 100 energy could be spend wich ever way you wanted) and well... that was just awsome! and there was also an other energy appart from the 100 you got every day (this you could trade for with ingame currency or get with real money) there was a small diffrence between the 2 appart from one being free every day and the other grindable or purchasable.

so now a bit about the new energy system, the dailey energy got removed (wich is even better then purchasing an elevator pass if you don't want to support the devs) and the elevator (maps) cost is removed wich makes it easy to play as much as you want, how you want. the other energy however is still there :) but now you can only either buy pre-forged weapons or craft new weapons. (same as the old system)

still sounds good doesn't it? :) offcourse it does! the energy system made it so you could play as much as you want. ok you COULD play as much as you want before but you needed to get the energy to do so wich was kinda pricy with ingame curency on lower lvl's (will come back on this too)

so now on to something that (will) ruin(ed) the game for new players and players that still need to create A LOT of gear... the forge! just thinking about this thing makes me glad i got to play the game for so long (1100+ hours hehe) this is the demon that makes this game 100 times more grindy compared to pre-update. after this thing came out i created a few new pieces for my arsenal (wich was easy at first because it had all of the stuff needed to create them) but then came upgrading time... and i still wonder if the idiot who thought this would be "fun" was high on crack or something! this thing can REALY make you give up on a good game...

and also an old problem that further emphasizes how bad the forge update actualy is. you guessed it... grinding for ingame curency and stuff to create/forge/upgrade gear.
why it's never realy adressed, i don't know... but boss fights (and the levels leading up to) give you A LOT more money and mats then just playing the random levels. wich makes grinding boring REAL fast.

I played this instead of watching the world cup final.

The game is very addicting, you make good friends and fight on, it's super cute, and has the best Sound Tracks in the game and the gameplay style feels like The Legend of Zelda Link to the past, above all, this is my personal favorite MMO that ever existed for me...

A very fun game to start off with!
Then after hours and hours of cartoony fun everything begins to grind to a halt, leveling your character becomes almost impossible without endless hours of grinding and at this point it becomes "free to play, pay to win." Other than this i have no problems with a great game.

PROS:
- Very good art.
- Very fun level design.
- Good mechanics.
- Community is great, friendly, and always wanna help others!
- Great game overall.

CONS:
- Becomes "pay to win."
- Music can get repetitive and boring if you play for hours.

My final rating: 8/10.

Why?
Although its pay to win, the hours of fun i've had with this game make up for it.
Play the game, enjoy it (i promise you will), and then when you get to the point where you cant continue very well, decide wether you wanna buy lots of gear or not. its free unless you choose to pay, so go hard gamers!
Try it out, you wont regret it!

This game was fun, at the start. It has a nice Zelda style gameplay, good design and art, plus a good crafting system and auction house and all that kind of stuff. The problem is the game just gets outright redundant before too long. The variety of the missions and the maps in the depths leaves a ton to be desired. After awhile it also becomes clear that there isn't as much weapon variety as you may have thought, and there are some weapon and armor combos that simply overpower others making many of them pointless.

The biggest problem is that while many MMO's deal with content issues early, they continue to develop and expand the game as time goes on. The issue here is that Three Rings has hardly developed a thing in the many years since the game came out. A few maps and missions have come in, but overall the story and main questing route all stalls exactly where it has since the very beginning. They're really good at developing new prize boxes to get people to pay real money for the chance of getting some rare cosmetic item, but development of the actual game has seemingly outright stalled. This last big update they hyped for quite awhile took over a year to come out and really just consisted of a few new guns and a couple new pieces of armor.

Spiral Knights is just a great example of a good game and a good concept losing its steam due to mismanagement and greed. If they cared as much about making progress on their game as they did about finding new ways to get people to spend cash on prize boxes then their game might have a larger playerbase and they wouldn't need to stoop so low to milk the cash cow. I'd love to see this game get back on its feet as I enjoyed the content it did have, but I just don't see that happening until the developer starts to care again. When all is said and done the game is dead now.

I've played this game for ages, more than I want to admit, when the guild hall update came out, we had one of the top guild halls, we saved 20 million crowns to make sure of that, quite honnestly, I spent around 2000$ on this game over the course of a year and a half, had an online girlfriend on there for over a year, made friends; some of who I talk to till this day; one of which, my head GM of my guild and I are pretty much best friends.

That being said, this game has every marking of a tax deductible.

there has been no significant new content in about 2 years, the admins on any social media including their own website WILL ban you for saying anything negative, the incompetence of the staff is IMMENSE and there is a-lot of cronyism going on in the studio.

on some occasions, I've had to contact the CEO directly to get anything done, this is not a normal practice for a game that once had such promise, when your staff basically favours certain players over others and exchange favours for e-stroking.

I've left this game about a year ago now, around the month of january 2014, I couldn't handle the ridiculousness of a crappy studio like three rings anymore.


It's a shame cause I made amazing friends on there, but my goodness, the people working there are awful. case in point, the gunner update took almost 2 years to release.


thanks for the reskins OOO.

Spiral Knights seems great, but lacks in plenty of places

Spiral Knights is an alright MMO, alright for free at least. It's definitely worth a try, seeing as how the initial pricetag is agreeable. For me, however, it's more of a social platform than a real kind of game. Allow me to explain as to why I see it as I do.

Part 1: The Gear

Spiral Knight's selection of equippable gear is quite wide at first glance, there are plenty of different resistances and weaknesses to all kinds of armor, all of which can be interchanged at a moment's notice, but the variety is wasted upon especially superior gear that provides a kind of range that none other can provide. For example, if you were to choose between say, a Seraphic set or a Wolver set, the seraphic would give a damage buff equal to that of the wolver. However, the Wolver set gives a universal buff to swords, meaning that it does what the seraphic does, but can go beyond that, as well. It's armors like those that begin to break down the options available through common sense and unfair stats. Why anyone would go with an armor so selective versus an armor completely open-ended is beyond me, and most likely anyone else.
An even better case is when it comes to early-game bombers and bombers overall. Bombs themselves are fairly underpowered items when working up, so it's more likely people go Gunner or Swordsman, for better attack and whatnot. Bombers overall that strictly follow the bomber line can choose the Mad Bomber Gear, giving them amazing stats for bombs, but horrible defense. There's another armor that does this, surprisingly, but, get this, it does it for EVERY WEAPON. Whoever decided that was a good idea must've thought pretty lowly of bombers, as it completely voids the Mad Bomber gear, allowing for sidearms and whatnot to be used in conjunction with bombs. All in all, the gear doesn't stop there, and most likely won't as the game progresses.

Part 2: Updates

You'd think with the previously mentioned, they'd begin working on balancing armors and fixing things up, right? Hah, no. You want some costumes? Here's a few hundred. You want some reskins? Here's a box of 'em, have fun. Balancing the game is about as much of a lie as Santa. As while it's not real content, some people still love ripping open the new boxes and slapping whatever colorful paper that was inside right onto their character. I can understand dishing out some cash for a thing to make you look snazzy, but why feed a company more money when their game's pretty darn broken? I understand wanting to make the most out of the overpowered gear, but seeing one team of adventurers run into a dungeon all brandishing the same kind of gear is boring, stale, and just sad. There is no unique quality among players, no matter what little accessory they slap onto their armor, it's still the same cookie-cutter formula. I had more fun running into a dungeon with some close friends of whom we all chose oddjob gear, it was complex, it was different, it was confusing, and most of all, it was fun. Don't even begin on promised "updates" that hold new gear, as they delay for as long as they can. I'd get more in-depth with it, but I'll have to get back to you on that one. (Pun intended.)

Part 3: The Monotony

So say you've finished the endgame, you've beat Vanaduke, heated your gear as far as you please, and have successfully reached the coveted rank of Vanguard. What's left? Apparently not much, if you don't have a guild, some good Spiral Knights friends, or anything immediately tying to it. The endgame leaves very little left, sure you have PvP, sure you have Blast Network, sure you might have guildruns, but why bother? PvP offers gear that has an alternative spin on some of your favorite (not-by-choice) weapons, with some stats made exceptionally worse, or some still a bit broken. But what's that to you? You've spent all this time grinding through repetitive missions for the things necessary to create your god-tier gear, so why bother struggling through all of that again? And don't try to play the card that PvP is interesting, it's usually the people with the broken gear using the broken swords. More often than not it's always Skolver wearing Strikers with the occasional Gunner or Snarbolax wearing Striker. Blast Network's just a bomberman port, playable by all skill levels no matter what, and to be fair, it's fairly fun. However, the lack of discrimination between skill levels can make it harsh on those who try it out, and more experienced players could potentially offset newcomers who'd like to begin playing as well.

Part 3-2: The Monotony

Don't think it's just endgame, either, as the monotony can set in as immediately as when you first begin to start. The missions assigned to you to gain rank feel incredibly scripted and not as free as they could be. It feels more like a chore than anything else, and nowhere near as fun as the random generation of the Clockworks (Which seems to be, for the most part, swept under the rug.). The Clockworks now takes discovering on your own to find, which the game already doesn't reward, making it harder to want to do so. Missions are also more likely to have the boxes you need to find to use for the drop system to give you the main crafting materials that you need for better gear, so that's another hit against the Clockworks. If you find that grinding much to your distaste, don't worry, the online store will be happy to help, for the right price, of course. Online store not your cup of tea either? The Auction House sells them at prices only a "few" monotonous boss runs can pay for!
I'm sure I could go on, but the review's already long enough as is.

Overall

Spiral Knights is an okay MMO, not great under any means, but it's not horrible. The only shining light that keeps this game from a true dark abyss would have to be it's community. The community has it's fair share of mean customers and nice folk. You can find some pretty good friends, and some truly cool people on this game. All it takes is a little bit of chatting, and you've found one heck of a pal. The missions and so are more tolerable with a fun group, as the dulling world can take on a new sense of rejuvenation with good talks, funny dialogue, and crazy moments. This game is saved by it's community, whether it be a good or bad thing. I only ever come back to Spiral Knights more for the people than the actual game, truth be told.

All in all, Spiral Knights receives a 6/10 from me, for what it's worth. The game has alot to fix, and sadly, they haven't done much fixing. The experience can only really be fulfilled with friends, as going alone can dull the sense of wonderment you'll receive initially. I say you take some time out and find a little clique of sorts that you do things with, and you'll make it one great of an experience.

Let me get the first issue out of the way: everything is server-side. Positioning, projectile paths, health, and loot -- the entire game-state is determined there.
This may not seem like such a bad thing, since many online games are like that. But in this game especially, an action game that demands precision and timing, even a small amount of latency can mess up an otherwise perfectly executed run, and it places an inherent limit on level design.

Imagine you've got a lame ISP, or you live somewhere many miles away from the servers, like Australia. See that wheel rolling down the field towards you? Yeah, it's already hit you. Since your connection isn't that great, the server won't realize you've moved your character out of the way until it's too late, and by then it'll already have decided that you've been hit.
See that energy bolt the gun puppy just fired? No, you didn't dodge it, sorry. What, you moved away, changing direction at the last second? Oh, but the way the system works, it continuously executes the last command your client sends to the server (which is why you sometimes see people running into the wall when they disconnect). It sure would be horrible if it was just a little bit too slow to send your desire to move away, huh?

This is why I find the combat in something like Phantasy Star Online 2 to be more satisfying. It wouldn't really be suitable for this game, but in PSO2, your interactions with enemies are client-side. You are always positioned at where you appear, and you will never be hit by something that shouldn't have hit you due to latency delay. This has a side-effect of making partying with others slightly confusing, but at least there it is impossible to blame the system for your death. Making these actions client-side has other effects on the game, like the risk of opening the game up to hacking, and occasional difficulty working in sync with your party, but that's all beyond the scope of this review.

By contrast, in Spiral Knights, you will never see a timing challenge any more stressful than slowly walking across some trap panels as they alternate their active states. You will never see any truly fast enemy or anything that represents an actual danger as evidenced by updates that have neutered enemy AI and behaviors within the last few years. To be fair, OOO has made several valiant attempts to remedy this, through shadow lairs and various danger missions(the dailies, Grinchlin, Tortodrone). But new, truly challenging missions have been few and far in between, and everybody's already figured out the lairs and the dailies.

...And don't be fooled by the apparently low sys reqs on steam. If your graphics card and processor aren't up to snuff, MARVEL AT YOUR REVOLUTIONARY 10 AND SOMETIMES 5 FRAMES PER SECOND

So what does this game have going for it?
Charm.
It is sort of perversely like Blizzard art direction, in which it is well made, with strong detail and proper form. And, also like Blizzard art direction, it hides a somewhat simple, perhaps even degenerate, game behind its pretty veneer.
Anyway, the style here is very simple, yet engaging. It draws you in, entices you. It is kind of like Maplestory in this regard, and that game had a TON of charm. Yet, rather also like Maplestory, it doesn't really have a lot of depth to it. And again they're both pretty much full of absurdly rich, absurdly bored people playing dress-up these days.

So why do I still play it? Nostalgia for what used to be. And a desire for a game like this that does everything better.

The main reason I dislike this game is because it follows the very commonly done formula of many FTP/MMOs, that is to say, players who do not want to dish out cash will be forced to grind and grind until they meet the necessary requirements to go onto the next level (in which they must do the same thing again).

At first, I thought Spiral Knights had a lot of promise. The art style is simply gorgeous, the playable characters, hell, EVERYTHING is adorable, the soundtrack was delightful and to top it all off it all had a huge Zelda influence. I thought this was going to be "Zelda: Four Swords The MMO", an aspect which got me very excited. Mostly because Nintendo didn't add online to the 3DS version of Four Swords.

This is not Four Swords the MMO. It is not fun. Combat is dreadful, especially by yourself on higher difficulties. In a nutshell, combat can be described as "hit and run" and repeat. There is no strategy involved, it's just a matter of paying attention and hoping the lag doesn't screw you over (this game lags a lot, at least for me and always at the worst possible times. I can't count how many times I've died because of it.) What makes matters worse is that if you die, you will need a material called "Spark of Life" to revive yourself so you don't lose all your things and can continue the mission. However, this material is very hard to find, but of course the only reliable way to obtain it is buying it with money. The only times I can tell you I legitamentally had fun are when I played with friends but then again, anything is fun with friends. You're probably saying, "since you suck at the game why don't you lower the difficulty bro?", well that's where the FTP structure comes in. Spiral Knights prevents you from progressing until your armor meets the minimum rank. In order to accomplish this, the game has a crafting system and you must collect the necessary materials and crowns (game's currency) in order to build the armor you need.

The problem is that the materials are extremely rare. These materials have a better chance of spawning on higher difficulties, but the drop rate is still low enough that you'll be forced to play the same mission again and again and again and again and again until you finally get what you need. This seems to get worse and worse as the more you progress, the better the armor the rarer the materials are. I assume this is how the FTP structure of this game works, to frustrate people enough to make them spend real money on these materials in order to progress. I can't really blame this, though, since a lot of free-to-play games do this sort of thing. Frankly, it's disgusting and makes for a bad videogame. I'd rather pay upfront for a game that won't give me BS than waste time doing something that's not fun and that I realize won't get me anywhere because the whole game will just be this.

I love the idea of Spiral Knights. I like the lore and the universe and it's characters and it's graphics. But this is a videogame, not a movie or a show so gameplay is the most important thing these sorts of things have to offer. And Spiral Knights offers bad gameplay. Maybe it'd be better off as a retail game or something, but this is just basic MMO design.

But, you can play this game without paying a single cent. Probably, I haven't finished it and I probably never will. You're just going to need to put up with repetitive, boring grinding to either find the materials or gather enough crowns to buy them off the market.

Unless you have a bunch of friends wanting to play this with you, don't waste your time on this.

Excellent game if you're into a casual MMORPG. It contains PvE features together with a VERY competitive PvP feature called "Lockdown." As a pro-league Dota 2 player, I felt that Lockdown was really enjoyable to play competitively.

Gameplay:
For short, it's a dungeon crawler. Nothing too shabby, with the birds-eye-view, you're pretty much aware of a decent radius around your character. The game consists of two default controls which focus on keyboard or mouse although fully customizable to your fitting especially if you have a gaming mouse or a gamepad. The game is full of innovative monsters which you're likely to enjoy and many levels which "rotate."
Graphics:
I have to say, I'm rather impressed with the vibrant atmosphere this game has. If you enjoy bright games, you'll love this. The chibi-style avatars are adorable enough to make you have to punch a wall to feel like a man again and the environment is surprisingly detailed. In terms of network-graphics, I'd say they did well enough to avoid graphical-lag - this, I can't explain through words so you'd have to play the game in order to get a feel of fluidity.
Social:
The player-base is small enough for you to socialize and gain deeper friends and wide enough to feel the game's population. Also, being recently implemented to Steam and Steam trading, it's a lot more convenient if you're a Steam gamer due to trade offers whilst offline and such convenient features - only way to get the feel for it is to actually play it and realize.
Support:
Their Spiral Knights Support is mainly based on actually mailing them. Their in-game support lacks and doesn't prioritize the most important aspects of so-called "support." So you can't really expect to get a hold of any "support" whilst in-game because it's not that convenient - only way is to contact them through email, which isn't so bad but could improve.

Overall I give the game an 8/10 - which would've been better if it weren't for their bad tech "support" and I emphasize "SUPPORT," not "filter" team.

The gameplay is amazing, with an easy combat system to learn. There is a lot of grinding involved, but I never actually got bored while playing, because the combat is just that much fun. However, the music is just okay, and the story leaves something to be desired.

8.5/10

What happened to this game?

After a long break, I came back to Spiral Knights hoping for the charming, cute and relaxing atmosphere it once had. A simple yet rewarding game. Go down the clockworks, level up your weapons, hope Basil has something awesome, kill some bosses, get deeper, trade at the auction house, buy energy through the market at the right time, and so on. The game was so fun yet simple that it lured me back over a year later without even being reminded of it.

So what is this game now? A grindfest. The main reason for this is because you can no longer level up your equipment more than once in a single Clockworks run, you need to grind for (sometimes ridiculous amounts of) Fire Crystals, waste Heat (experience) and "forge" them even then with a chance of failure.

Adding to this, the mission system feels completely detached from the game itself, in fact a lot of the modes are. Everything just doesn't meld together, it feels like a mix of gameplay ideas all accessed from a mess of a menu system. Zero immersion unlike before.

I can overlook the poor performance because it's a game written in Java. Which in itself is huge feet. Optimising games in Java is hard, especially to look like Spiral Knights does.

The music is relaxing and exilerating at the right times. The enemies, though lacking in variety, are well designed much like the rest of the characters and stages.

It's just sad that Three Rings decided to take the game in this direction. Though, with the servers still being somewhat dodgy, it's probably a choice of what we have now or nothing at all.

Im looking foward to this considering its my first review.
This is probably the most played game in my steam library, but there is reasons why i dont recommend it. (keep in mind..... my game time in this game is over 3k hrs)
So without further do lets begin.

Intro Experience 10/10
If not the best, one of the best intro experiences i have experienced in all my years of dugeon gaming. Nice, catching, simple and smooth intro to controls and the world known as heaven, and above all the game feels ORIGINAL

Midterm Experience 7/10 (woudve been a 6 if the mist system was still intact)
So now u have familiarized urself with all the basics in the game to acheive greatness (crafting, grinding, marketing, etc). My only problem here is that u begin to notice how repitive the game is (spamming the same missions over and over again). Depths look exactly the same except reskinned (same with the AI). You soon start to notice a repitive chain of BORING grinding.

End Game Experience 1/10
U have basically completed all the missions available (what now?). PvP is swarming with players that drop big bucks on this game to get the jump on u (Skill < Gear). Grinding feels like a boring drag. By this time u start to notice the pay 2 win aspect of this game (either u grind the agonizing BORING depths, or u simply drop some cash on this game). And i can guarantee u that u dont get what u pay for in this game (overated cr$$).

Updates 0/10
literally same repeated events each year, sh$$ boxes that just urge u to waste ur precious money. 90% of the updates are overated fashion assesories. In general only 2 useful updates are realeased a year (and they are pretty simple themselves)

Conclusion
In the end this game is short-lived in a way. i would 100% not recommend this game to anybody looking to go into the long run. Shame this game has alot of potential, and the BEST community i have seen up to date.