Aside from being a game filled with hazardous paywalls (which can be easily averted), and other nasties with the ingame economy, I really don't see why this title gets so much flak from the community.

Solid Multiplayer RPG, four man dungeon crawling. Wearing armor and items while you complete levels allows you to gain EXP (Known as Heat) to further level the items to a maximum of level 10. From there you can transmute and pick different branches that you want to evolve your weapon for a cost of in-game currency.

The game used to employ a revive system where you would share your HP to revive them, and uses now items known as Spark of Life. The game used to be much more limited in terms of how much you could play per day, your Knight would store "Mist Energy" in their armor as time passes, and you could use this energy to power the Elevators (which help you advance to lower dungeons in the specific dungeon series).

The dungeons in general are randomly generated based on user contributions to that specific elevator, by adding different crystals (which you can find in almost every level), you may influence how the next dungeon will be generated. I believe it is a nice addition to the randomness of the stages, and it forces you to be prepared for the dungeons you go into.

The netcode is rather solid, I have not had many problems with my connection and playing the game, aside from the occasional lag spike between other players.

The themes and atmosphere are well designed, and the music compliments said environments.

All in all I would very much reccomend this game to my friends and family, even though my opinion may be unpopular.

I played this instead of watching the world cup final.

Spiral Knights is a good game, this game is totally recommended for young kids, this game is not a hardcore RPG like Diablo, Torchlight, or Path Of Exile, however Spiral Knights is a brawler type of game, it has a different feel, it has a mixture of fantasy medieval futuristic theme to it

this game has a lot more things to do, it has a rich story and the environment are very unique and interesting, even after finishing the game, you'll still have a lot of fun things to do and explore, even with friends this game is a lot of fun, since enegry has been moved to an optional thing, the game is less frustrating then before,

and overall this game fun, unique and cute

The game at first is rather enjoyable and I saw a lot of potential in it, it was exciting and somewhat addictive, I liked the weapons and accessories, alot of which look amazing, despite the fact the SK team seem to like reskinning previous weapons. But, it's a free game after all, and you know there will always be downfalls. Now on the negitive side there's alot to talk about; first off the levels, they are constantly repeated over and over again, and it bugs me because it isn't hard at all to dedicate a mere month (or less) to creating fresh new level designs, and it's not like these are professional graphics we're dealing with here, it makes the developers seem lazy and unmotivated to build upon the game and this is where part of the boredom of many SK players is born.

I would also like to address this to you all, take it into consideration.
Three Rings seem to be reskinning alot of things, weapons in particular, but they're not making anymore levels, why? BECAUSE MAKING LEVELS DOESN'T GET THEM MONEY. Three Rings are going in the complete opposite direction then what I had hoped they'd go. The updates are just getting more and more disappointing.

Another major problem is the forge. So, in the 'good old days' (asides from elevator energy) you could collect heat to level up your weapon, and each time it levelled up the remaining heat will be put towards the next level etc. But the forge update ruins that, instead of remaining heat being put toward the next level, it stops, and you have to exit the mission just to level up your weapon manually, and here's the annoying part, during missions you collect heat crystals from boxes which are used to level up, fair enough... right? Well guess what, if you have a 4* or 5* weapon you got to be willing to give up days just to collect enough heat crystals to level up by 1. Because the forge has a chance of FAILING which means all those heat crystals you spent hours finding are gone. The only way you can get a 100% chance is by sacrificing a TON of heat crystals. For example my Blackhawk needed 69 shining crystals just so it would level up by 1, 69! It's unbareable. No one has the patience to go looking for 69 shining crystals just for 1 level. And just so you all know, that Blackhawk wasn't even at level 4 yet.

The graphics aren't good at all, it's just looks like the developers said: "Yeah, well, atleast it looks cool, we don't care about it, we need to spend our time on new reskins that look cool so we can get more money". Now I know what you're all thinking, but I don't judge a game purely on graphics and they could fix it, give or take another 2 years. All in all, if I enjoy it, I don't care much about graphics. You can choose from 3 different ways to play the game which is good. There's Mouse driven, Gamepad and wasd, typical stuff for a PC game, and that's probably for the best.

The final thing I would like to address are the SK servers. 60% of the time there's extreme lag, and this is not due to my internet connection, many other people complain about lag. I've been playing this game for over a year and ATLEAST one person complains about lag during a mission, I would also like to say to you that these are NOT the same people, I play with random and hopefully skilled players. Another thing is that monsters can kill you even when you lose connection to the servers, it can even go as far as using up your Spark of Life even when you're not there (I am not sure if this is fixed or if it's still an issue) and Spark's of Life are too rare, even though they claim to have increased the drop rate. With all the money coming in you would assume they're doing their best to make the game more enjoyable, but it doesn't seem that way at all, all the money you spend on the game doesn't seem to be going towards the game. But on the other hand, that could be due to the fact many people have abandoned SK and not many players come on anymore.

Overall, this game is best played casually. There's not many events to keep you occupied and even when there are they're not very *different* from one another, except for the Apocrea event. I wouldn't recommend this game to people who think graphics are vital or people who hate casual games which shouldn't be taken seriously. Although, if you like laid back games about knights decending to the core and finding absolutely nothing, then this is the game for you.

This is just the sad truth of a game which had potential, whether you like the game or not. But don't get me wrong, I really liked it when I first started, and I'm not telling you to stay away from it, if you want to play it then go ahead, but this is all the annoying aspects I picked up from over 500 hours of playing it.

-Kaiba

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.

Having played the game for over 300 hours, seeing many iterations of the game, and seeing the general direction of where the game is headed, I honestly can't recommend it for most players.
There's a lot of problems with the way the game is run and how it is being developed that are more than a little concerning. Over the course of the two years I've played this game, I've gone from having a lot of hope for it and being really excited to see how it develops, to being sorely disappointed with the quality of the updates and actually feeling sad for all the squandered potential the game had.

Let's get into details now shall we?

Positives:
- Gameplay
Pretty unique in its gameplay. Haven't seen any other MMO that plays quite like it. A good take on translating the top-down Legend of Zelda style play and turning it into an MMO. It's easy to understand and play, with some advanced techniques to pick up along the way.
The randomly generated levels also add a bit of replayability to the game.
- Sound
The music for the game is pretty good. Though generally upbeat and calm, it can get hectic or atmospheric when it needs to.
The sound effects are also pretty decent and add a lot of character to the colorful cast of enemies you'll find yourself beating down.
- Art
The absolute biggest positive of the game in my opinion. Virtually every art asset is well designed and rendered in a very unique and eyecatching style. They're also very well animated to boot!
Granted, there are some exceptions where lazy design or lackluster work sticks out (an example being a certain line of upgradeable helmets only has 2 textures between all 6 of them), but overall the art is what stands out the most to me.
- Community
Honestly one of the nicest MMO communities I've seen. There's hardly any hostilities towards other players and most players are genuinely helpful towards one another. The glaring exception being the PvP minigame, Lockdown.

Negatives:
- Updates
One of the most disappointing things about the game is the general lack of content brought by updates. It is understandable that updates aren't frequent when you realize how small the OOO dev team is, but the amount of content released over the course of the two years I've played is pitifully small. A lot of the "new" content is just rehashed older content to pad out the game or one-time bosses, enemies, and set pieces put into single Missions while the rest of the gameworld (which is played VASTLY more than most single Missions) is in sore need of more variety.
And that's not even getting into the annoying cash-grab updates dedicated solely to costumes.
- Performance
Being an MMO built on Java, there's definitely going to be performance issues unless the game is perfectly optimized (which it isn't). An abundance of entities on the screen can slow the game to a crawl no matter the quality, which wouldn't be a problem if there weren't also an insane abundance of levels that use huge hordes of enemies and particle effects. The game lags a lot and that's not even getting into the extremely small number of servers causing problems for those that can't get a decent connection.
Then there's also an inherent problem with the game running on Macs which further harms performance. Not as pronounced a problem, but definitely noticeable.
- Balance
One of the biggest breaking points for me. The balance of the arsenal of weapons and armor is abyssmal. Some weapons are inexplicably far more powerful and useful than others. Others are so painfully useless or weak that it's a wonder if they get used at all.
Example: Any armor that "emphasizes" defense doesn't offer much more defense than other armors that also offer major attack bonuses. Even then, most of the defensive sets only allow you to take a single extra hit or maybe two incomparison to the offensive sets. Essentially, any armor set that doesn't boost your attack power in some way is obsolete to those that do.
It's been this way for YEARS, with the community clamoring for balance and suggesting ways to balance things out. Some balance changes were even promised for underpowered or broken weapons, but after more than a year on some of them, no changes have been made.
It completely baffles me why the devs can't simply change numbers around on the equipment, but it apparently is too tough for them to do so.
Speaking of broken balance...
- Lockdown
The broken balance certainly doesn't help things in Spiral Knight's PvP mini-game. Aside from equipment making it hard to take seriously, it's a PvP game and generates all the toxicity that a PvP crowd can. Unless you're really into PvP, it's best to steer clear from this unbalanced mess.
- Grinding
Being a Free-to-Play MMO, grinding is to be expected. However, with the limited number of randomly generated areas and how little moneyand experience some areas offer in comparison to the boss levels, it gets incredibly dull, incredibly fast.
And then there's the issue of the Forge, a mechanic that slows down a player from levelling their equipment. Aside from needing the game's equivalent to experience, you also need a rather big number of rare items for a CHANCE to bring your euipment to the next level unless you use a LARGE number of said rare items to get that chance to 100%. Then there's the fact that you can't access the Forge from everywhere in the game, which creates a disconnect between gaining a level and that rewarding feeling of leveling up.
- Difficulty
I don't quite agree with OOO's idea of difficulty being to add more health and damage onto monsters or to throw so many monsters at the players that damage is nigh unavoidable. It just reinforces the superiority of the offensive sets of equipment since they can deal with both sitautions faster and more efficiently. More diverse groupings of enemies or improving the AI along with the general power given to the players is the more fulfilling and strategic route to go, in my opinion. Giving the mosters more health and damage just makes battles long, grindy, and extremely frustrating should they touch you.
- Revive system
This used to be a big plus for the game until the mechanic was completely overhauled earler this year.
Before, players could pick up any allies that got incapacitated at the cost of half of their health. It encouraged teamplay and helping each other out, while also making most players cautious with their health since it could save a teammate as well.
Now, you can't offer your health to revive your team. It instead relies on a rare item that you can either get from treasure drops or purchase with your own money. If you want to revive a teammate it's going to cost you one of your own revive items and to even do so you have to open a menu and select to revive said teammate. It takes a lot more time and is never even mentioned as an option in the game as opposed to the old method where all you had to do was stand near your teammate, see the revive icon, and click.
This change really broke the teamplay aspect of the game for me. Instead of your team making daring rescues to revive one another, now you have your team lying on the floor begging for a revive because they don't want to use their own.
- End game
The end game has been stagnant for more than a year now. Once you have your 5 Star equipment set and reach the end of the Missions there honestly isn't much to do unless you have money to pay for the Shadow Lairs. Even then, the Shadow Lairs are seriously just rehashed boss levels with hordes more enemies to make it more "difficult." What's worse is that you have to pay an exorbitant amount of Energy/real money to even enter one of them ONCE. All for useless, gimmicky pieces of armor.

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And that's my review for the game. Feel free to give it a look (it is free afterall), but be warned that there are a LOT of problems with the game.
Personally, I'd recommend trying out another free MMO like Warframe or maybe Vindictus.