[ER] The Knife - Slashingly Splendid Or Choppy?

The Knife is a game created by proxyrox

Proxyrox is a member whose feature count has certainly been rising over the past couple of months, and to his credit too, his shooters have really been supplying the cutting edge gameplay that all of us have been craving. So will The Knife be up to the same, sharp quality that Proxyrox has been delivering? I already know the answer because I played this game a while ago, however the tension must certainly be built early on the review, so let us slice and dice our way through this game.

The big chunk of this game is undoubtedly the action. Proxyrox lets us know early on that this game is going to be fast and mostly he wants the player to react instinctively rather than to carefully plan out their next moves. Of course there are certainly times when you can take a breather and plan out your next move, but the parts that really stuck with me are the times where Proxyrox threw you in a situation and you had to react quickly. A notable example was when you entered a room where around a couple of seconds later a heavy cruiser would set off a chain reaction of nitro. Proxy gives you the appropriate room to navigate around the section and enough warning as well. There are also multiple pusher sections with mortars firing left and right which instills a bit more of that heart racing action I loved. On top of this, Proxy provides you with a decent amount of health to get you through the game while still providing a fair and moderate challenge. While it seems like it�s all smooth sailing so far in this review, there is something in The Knife which really just grind my gears.

At times, Proxyrox�s enemy placement is quite weak. A blue spider key is easily battled by shooting it around a corner while it helplessly panics in a small room, and some turrets and launches are places around hallways and can easily be killed without losing ANY health at all. It felt like it happened a little too much in the game, and this could have easily been avoided had Proxy made a few alterations to the map or just cut the enemies out completely. Overall, enemies are often well placed but there are a few too many places where I felt like they were poorly positioned, or they could have just been slashed altogether.

I enjoyed the scenery that Proxy implemented, the polygons gave bursts of colour and gave a quite unique feel to the game. However, at times I really did not enjoy how he placed them on the playfield. Occasionally I would be slipping all over the ice poly trying to shoot a turret that should have been killed with ease, and it was just a layer of frustration. I also didn�t particularly enjoy the mud polygons, they felt like they were there to force the player to take damage from mortars and cut down their health.

Proxyrox has done an excellent job at The Knife, and succeeds in the fundamentals of a good design and usually great action that provides great fun for around five or so minutes. However, the game is let down by the occasional poor placement of enemies and assortments of polygons.

3.75/5

A mostly slashingly (yes I know that's not really a word) splendid game.

PS. I have been including knife puns all over the place. 1 if you recognised it.