Robot Invader
A Knight to Remember
Check out all of our past reviews.
 - Game Industry News)
'Ello Time Wasters!
Its back to my phone again this week as I fulfill my fantasies of being Solid Snake. That's right, I'm hiding behind printers and somersaulting my way past the bosses offices to bring you the best in Smartphone gaming.
Our title this week is Wind-up Knight. It's the classic story of a knight off to save the princess and defeat the evildoer, though why our knight has a wind up key in his back is a mystery to me.
The idea behind Wind-up Knight is fairly straight forward. Our knight has to make his way from one end of the level to the other. We have a lot of obstacles in our way though. Falling ceilings, cockatrices, spike pits and low walls will have us blocking, slashing, jumping and rolling our way from beginning to end.
Of course no game is complete without collectibles and Wind-up Knight brings it in troves. Each level contains a certain amount of coins and one collectible card. Collecting all of the coins and cards isn't necessary but doing so will reward us with a higher rank at the end of the level and more notes.
Notes are the currency of Wind-up Knight that can be used to purchase everything from new armor and swords for our little friend to the next set of levels in the game, of course you can always use real money if you find perfection of every level too hard or tiring.
Speaking of buying armor, Wind-up Knight has a nice little collection of iron for us to deck him out in. Some of the armors have practical uses such as making our knight invulnerable to flames or falling objects, while others simply exist to make our knight look cooler as he runs into battle. The armors with benefits make the game much easier, so while the idea behind it is cool, to get the full experience I would often equip different armors on m y first play through of a level. There is one case though where the armors with benefits come in really handy: Knightmare levels (dun dun duuuuun).
There is one Knightmare level per book ( four books total) and to unlock them we have to get a rank A or higher on every level in the book. As the name implies, Knightmare levels are crazy hard and will have our knight jumping, rolling, blocking, and slashing like never before as he does his very best to survive.
The visuals in Wind-up Knight are cute and cuddly with an underlying tone of serious medieval action. This and the simple sound of a cockatrice dying and background music played on a violin all come together to create a wonderful atmosphere about the game.
Wind-up Knight runs and jumps its way to 5 GiN Gems our of 5!
Billy loves nothing more than leveling and grinding through a good RPG. And he knows that Time Waster is not a negative term when it comes to games. : billum256@yahoo.com.
Billy White, 4A Games, Robot Invader, Android, iPhone/iPad