I personally think Metacritic is BS. The scores there are usually either fanboys giving perfect scores to every game, even acknowledging the flaws in said games (makes you wonder how they'd treat an actual work of perfection) or trolls giving scores of the lowest calibre. Hell, I see people giving scores of 0 to balance out the scores of 10 all the time there.

Also, I find that the scoring system for games is pretty terrible, in large part to the Average Joe with little-to-no knowledge of scoring/critique. If you were to give an average film a score, it'd be 2-3 stars, which translates to roughly a 5 out of 10. In gaming, the masses assume the fallacious opinion that an "average" game, particularly within the AAA 'clique', to be 8 at the bare minimum. A 6, which is what Spiral Knights received from Metacritic, is considered a bad game, and anything under 6 is considered a joke.

My point is, Metacritic (and many other 'review' sites), in my opinion, should not be trusted for quality. However, they can, in certain cases, have occasional good points to make, however rare they may be. Spiral Knights got a 64% score, which is above average.

The game itself is not exceptional by any means, and I don't personally find it engaging enough to play as much as many others, but that's because of the lack of variety. I find the community is both the strongest and weakest link the game has. So many people cry outrage when a new update comes out, and yet you're guaranteed to find a group that's thoughtful and intelligent about most anything about the game. That small group is the only reason I stick around anymore. Otherwise I'd have burned out and left a long time ago.

Lol @ no end-game content...

The game deserved at least an 85 at Steam Launch. However, I think the game has declined and deserves its current score.

This game easily deserves a 85. The game has improved and doesn't deserve its current score.

Of course you "finished" it so fast, you just paid to win.

Even before OOO removed the mist system SK deserved a higher score. MS was full of it from the get go.

The review served as a good wake up call for OOO about how terrible new players have it, lots of cranky kids probably hop on and saw "MIST? THIS GAME MUST BE TERRIBLE!" and OOO needed to know just how intolerant people were, but at the same time MS was too dumb to actually look through the majority of the game or even attempt to understand the CE system. MS's opinion on games is about as valuable as the squeakers that pollute their cherished sack of crap known by the name of WM3.

The game I am playing right now has currently 10 areas. Each with their own boss and/or mini-boss. 3 difficulty modes which is soon to be 4. (Another step towards stronger and faster enemies). Advance versions of most of the areas. An actual storyline that you can do if you want too. (Don't have to do it to unlock new areas and fight the random event bosses). Probably at least 500+ weapons and different classes. Best part is everything it actually free since its free to play. I've done all the content so far without paying a penny and not having to do "grinding" past walls since I could choose an area I felt like playing and doing quest there for exp bonuses.

Not saying MS is good or bad at giving scores. Just from my time playing Spiral Knights this game really does have a lack of content. Grind walls. Reskinned promos. A lack of bosses and areas. The game was made for the average gamer at best. Not hardcore gamers.

I could go on, but after getting my better computer and playing other games. I do feel like Spiral Knights deserves the rating it got and to this day still does. Make of that what you will but there will always be those people that either love a game and blindly give it max rating, those that troll and give 0 rating, and those that actually take time to give it a true rating.

Steam says I have 3.5k hours in Spiral Knights. I think I've been on it long enough to express what I felt.

And forgot that OOO is a small team.

Oh so you say this game is P2P because of some optional buyable stuff that costs less than dinner at some restaurants? Well then I would love to see you make a F2P game with just a small group of people without giving the option of buying anything in the game and still have enough money to keep the game going and make a living off of. I do not deny that their ways of encouraging you to buy CE weren't very nice but since the battle sprite update that has definitely changed for the better. This game has a very good community (mostly) and fun gameplay. If you don't like SK then play a game you do like and stop wasting your time here.

I sense some anger issues from one of the many post above this one. Forgive some of the actual SK vets for giving a legitimate view on the game from their point of view. Some fanboys around here...

I haven't logged in for the past 2 months or more and actually uninstalled SK a week after the battle sprites update when I saw how much of a joke Elite mode was. No one says Metascore knows what they are doing, but Spiral Knights isn't the cream of the crop either. People can't help it if Three Rings is a small team. It isn't an excuse. It's like going to a store and waiting in line for some absurd amount of time because they can't or refuse to hire enough help. Just this case the store is their game world. Where you go to play and potentially spend money on their product. Some of these people that posted in here are people with accounts more than two years old now who have probably in 1 or 2 months (if they played when it first came out) did everything there was to do and when Three Rings added new content every 6 months or so probably did that also.

Now that the mist system is gone people are more free to do what they want. To actually go around and see the content that most of the vets got to see when the game first launched and didn't have missions. Over time little things like scenario rooms got added to the clockworks that I am sure most of the people that just farmed boss missions don't even know exist.

It -is- an above average rating but not cream of the crop rating.

So, 1 medioum energy packet and 2 elevator passes make you finish the game? Anyother reason the game has a low score then acording to your opinion, it was pay to win.

@Batabii
+0.5

I don't think the game's current state of affairs warrants another look from reviewers. Few things have changed since I started playing, and the game is still lacking in new content considering its life-span. Yes, we know the whole 'low-on-staff' drill, but that doesn't change the fact that the game doesn't have a lot to offer. The current end-game is either more of the same or really expensive depending on how you look at it, and neither is a point in the game's favour. And by more of the same I mean that by the time you've reached end-game you've likely seen most, if not all, of the levels in the game, and you're not likely to run into anything new until the next content patch.

Besides, as Echoez stated, having the game re-evaluated with every update is ridiculous, and I would personally like to see much more content added before I'd agree with the notion of a re-evaluation, and at the current pace we're going I don't see that happening for a long time.

On the subject of the score itself, I've come to agree with it. Once you've played through and hold a firm grasp of what the game's all about you will likely arrive at the same conclusion. Some even argue that the score it was given is too generous, and I can see where they're coming from.

In short, no, I think the current score provided by Metacritics represents the quality of the game. Above average, but not fantastic.

I agree with your sensible vision. I just complained that there are players that thinks the OOO is a machine that make games and have time to work 24 hours per day. They need to sleep too. Even with the face on keyboard.

Critics just don't get time to play. At most they take a quick glance and push in 10 hours into this game, then it's over. Scores based off this 10 hours ain't the same as scores based off 800 hours of gameplay.

This game would score very well for core aesthetics and overall design, but content is certainly most lacking, not like pumping in so much content would help to extend the game's lifespan. The energy system also downplays the gameplay, so I guess score of 60-70 is reasonable.

I don't understand why people hate the new UI, other than the fact that you can no longer see everyone's exact hp or whether they're waiting on the elevator.

@ Batabii

I will quote Hemsy (who's a good friend of mine who left because of UI update)

'Go play on a 13' mac and come back to me, THEN we can talk'

Not everyone play the same way... People play on different machine with different resolution and it may block more than you originally thought. Plus you couldn't remove the weapon wheel when he left (blocking a lot on a 13' monitor I would say).

The new UI brought a lot of unecessary stuff, whether you like it or not, HP and Shield bar in Haven = useless, the elemental status got switched to the upper left rather then being in the bottom middle like it was for the past 2 years... A lot of "expected" stuff wasn't put in and got everyone by surprise and gave people that wanted to leave, a reason to.

A lot of stuff changed quickly, I think that's the major reason... If the transition would've been slower, people wouldn't have over-reacted like they did

I still don't get why anyone cares about metascores opinion.

Forgot to mention, lame/nonsensical updates also detract from playability.

(Brandish buff? Really?)

As you said, two problems is not being able to see other's hp, and if they are standing on the elevator. The others I can remember:
-Not being able to see our exact maximum hp after the secod row. (if we might want to conserve bigger hearts on the floor)
-Not being able to see our cr and ce without opening the arsenal.
-There's simply too much things now on screen for no reason. In LD, the player list doesn't even fit on the screen sometimes.
-The unnecessary image of our knight which takes away too much of the screen on low resolution.
-On higher resoluitons, the important informations, like hp, debuffs or buffs, are too far away from our knight, and easily breaks the focus of the battle.
-Our current weapon is not on the screen anymore, and there's no way to tell which one is cursed or not. It's pretty problematic on UFSC, the Black Kat event, or even on LD sometimes.
-Since the UI update, the mouse cursor annoyingly changes it's own position back to a button after a window takes too much time to load, even while the game is in the background.
-The game also slutters more since then.

I absolutely do agree with the original post. This game deserves more review points after these 2 years, and this barefaced PC Gamer UK "review" is a pure shame (I saw this liar review one week ago). I seriously wish OOO or Sega would bring an action against them, since they are glorifying character / name assassination with this great game (no joke! Maybe my poor grammar confuses you). I'm also unable to understand how someone can support something like PC Gamer. Because of that impudent review I won't recommened them and warn everyone about them (especially friends). It's absolutely not tolerable that such a guy of them publishes a liar review just because he didn't got his expected free to play hugs. Maybe the "review" has even a bad score because they wanted to see money from OOO or Sega, it is not impossible! I have no respect for the PC Gamer magazine. You will understand me completely, after you saw the part where he does wrongly hint that the Snarbolax bell would cost money. This person does even work for them today. I'm more than shocked! And they do even make money with such lies!!!

Thanks for reading.

Ellthan-Cosmolion wrote:
"Plus, a lot of things are not really thought out, like the forge the revives and the repetitive missions.
Also, as I said, the game has little variety and is very repetitive, I mean, it all boils down, to a small amount of levels
you do over and over and over again but with a different title each time.
Plus, the levels are too limited, but they are adding open world sandbox so I think this might change.

In short:

The game need A LOT more content, the only thing with variety is armors."

I do absolutely agree with you as well. And I don't think that it's an excuse anymore to say "But they have a small team". Because there are many games which have proven, that even with a little 1 - 3 people team it's possible to create more fun and especially more content-rich games than this game has. Why? Because players are able to create their own content. I'm sure you have heard of games like Minecraft, Terraria, Trackmania, games from Valve (for example Portal 2) and many more. These games share the option to create own content. Even if you don't want to create levels, maps, whatever, others have done that, and you could choose from sooo much levels, maps, mods, whatever! I don't really realize how developers can ignore the fact, that the community can take away so much work for them, some would even pay for that. These developers out there which haven't ignored the fact, ended up with a game, which has by far more game and money success than this.

post 1: All of my yes.

post 2: Sadly, yes. More than we should, really.