Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows is an Explosive First Expansion
When Shovel Knight was released in the summer of 2014, it rightly won accolades for everything from its charming retro art and music to its clever writing and punishing – yet fair – difficulty. What many players forgot, though, is that the game is actually far from finished.
This week the game’s first expansion, Plague of Shadows, launched, allowing players to take on the role of Plague Knight, one of the original game’s bosses. The expansion is available as a free download for all current Shovel Knight owners and will come packaged with the game at no cost for newcomers.
Plague Knight is just one of three playable boss characters unlocked as stretch goals in Shovel Knight’s Kickstarter campaign. Future updates will give players control of King Knight and Specter Knight, as chosen by fans in a poll last year. These updates were originally set to come out just a few months after Shovel Knight’s release, when in fact the first took more than a year. That may not be bad news, however, as Yacht Club, the game’s developer, stated at the time that gameplay for the bosses would be largely identical to that of the titular Shovel Knight. What we got instead was a whole new campaign, sharing only the levels themselves with the base game. Plague of Shadows adds a new story, changes some level layouts and even adds a new lair to explore, the guards from Shovel Knight’s original village for some reason not wanting a bird-masked sower of disease wandering their streets.
In the original campaign, besting Plague Knight was a brutal challenge as he lobbed bombs and poison with abandon at your hapless blue knight. Yacht Club could have gone the route of countless RPGs and dialed down Plague Knight’s abilities once players got their hands on him, but if anything he seems even more capable. Plague Knight’s signature attack is a bomb that explodes either after a short delay or once it hits an enemy. Effective from the beginning, its potency only grows as players move through the game.
The core of Plague of Shadows’ upgrade system is the ability to swap out three different bomb components – casings, fuses, and powders – which can have huge effects on your attacks. You might choose to add a longer delay, change the arc of your toss, or add lingering damage to your bombs, for instance.
Swapping these components gets even more complicated when they start to affect your mobility. Charging up an attack will allow you to launch yourself high into the air, and throwing a bomb while airborne will slow your descent. This allows you to essentially fly from one end of the screen from another, but different bomb parts can limit your options by allowing you to throw only one bomb at a time or changing the way your explosive jump works.
All this mobility looks great on paper, but in practice it can be a beast to handle. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One of Shovel Knight’s biggest merits is its difficulty, but the quick and sometimes unpredictable way that Plague Knight dives through the air can leave you feeling out of control and lead to some frustrating deaths. Overall, though, the sickly new protagonist offers way more options in both offensive ability and maneuverability than Shovel Knight ever did.
If you just couldn’t stomach Shovel Knight’s vicious difficulty or were turned off by its retro aesthetic, Plague of Shadows is not going to do it for you. But if you’ve been on the fence over whether Shovel Knight was worth it – it was, for the record – the expansion's release essentially means you’re now getting two great games for the price of one.
This week the game’s first expansion, Plague of Shadows, launched, allowing players to take on the role of Plague Knight, one of the original game’s bosses. The expansion is available as a free download for all current Shovel Knight owners and will come packaged with the game at no cost for newcomers.
Plague Knight is just one of three playable boss characters unlocked as stretch goals in Shovel Knight’s Kickstarter campaign. Future updates will give players control of King Knight and Specter Knight, as chosen by fans in a poll last year. These updates were originally set to come out just a few months after Shovel Knight’s release, when in fact the first took more than a year. That may not be bad news, however, as Yacht Club, the game’s developer, stated at the time that gameplay for the bosses would be largely identical to that of the titular Shovel Knight. What we got instead was a whole new campaign, sharing only the levels themselves with the base game. Plague of Shadows adds a new story, changes some level layouts and even adds a new lair to explore, the guards from Shovel Knight’s original village for some reason not wanting a bird-masked sower of disease wandering their streets.
In the original campaign, besting Plague Knight was a brutal challenge as he lobbed bombs and poison with abandon at your hapless blue knight. Yacht Club could have gone the route of countless RPGs and dialed down Plague Knight’s abilities once players got their hands on him, but if anything he seems even more capable. Plague Knight’s signature attack is a bomb that explodes either after a short delay or once it hits an enemy. Effective from the beginning, its potency only grows as players move through the game.
The core of Plague of Shadows’ upgrade system is the ability to swap out three different bomb components – casings, fuses, and powders – which can have huge effects on your attacks. You might choose to add a longer delay, change the arc of your toss, or add lingering damage to your bombs, for instance.
Swapping these components gets even more complicated when they start to affect your mobility. Charging up an attack will allow you to launch yourself high into the air, and throwing a bomb while airborne will slow your descent. This allows you to essentially fly from one end of the screen from another, but different bomb parts can limit your options by allowing you to throw only one bomb at a time or changing the way your explosive jump works.
All this mobility looks great on paper, but in practice it can be a beast to handle. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One of Shovel Knight’s biggest merits is its difficulty, but the quick and sometimes unpredictable way that Plague Knight dives through the air can leave you feeling out of control and lead to some frustrating deaths. Overall, though, the sickly new protagonist offers way more options in both offensive ability and maneuverability than Shovel Knight ever did.
If you just couldn’t stomach Shovel Knight’s vicious difficulty or were turned off by its retro aesthetic, Plague of Shadows is not going to do it for you. But if you’ve been on the fence over whether Shovel Knight was worth it – it was, for the record – the expansion's release essentially means you’re now getting two great games for the price of one.
