Thanks to PigeonDev for the review key!

Bucket Knight is a run ‘n gun platformer where it’s more fun to run than it is to gun, and nothing is stopping you from ignoring almost all the game’s core mechanics. From watching the trailer it looked fast-paced and fluid. In reality, fighting the large number of enemies on the screen is a slog and more often than not, a waste of time.

The goal of each level is to simply get to the exit. Sometimes there are minor puzzles to hinder you with the exit often being blocked behind a locked door. Enemies and traps are rampant but seeing as the objective never requires actually fighting these baddies, they become irrelevant and annoying. Even the most basic enemy types in this game take several hits to kill, and when you add up the dozens of enemies on each level, to spend time clearing the level of foes could realistically take up to 10 minutes. Up until the fourth area, I had no issues simply ignoring the enemies and just dodging the badly designed bullets they send my way. Bullets that travel way too fast for the kind of level design the game wants, and a lot of the time are useless to consider genuinely attempting to dodge. You end up taking more damage trying to fight things than you do by just running past them.

You can spend an (absurd) amount of gold to get a new weapon that’ll still take several hits to kill an enemy. After going through about 60% of the game I had only been able to unlock the basic machinegun upgrade because things simply cost too much. Maybe it was because I wasn’t killing enemies for most of the game, but currency seemed very stingy and I was stuck with the starting pistol for most of my time.

The platforming itself is…serviceable. I enjoyed leaping from platform to platform ignoring all the angry skeletons and bats around me. It feels a bit heavy and the jump height is a bit low, and sometimes I could clip into the edge of a platform. Level design itself was decent aside from enemy placement - medium-sized levels with some secrets here and there and some nice trap design.

The menus, UI, and controls are all terrible. Nothing explains to you the controls and there is no option to rebind anything. Movement wasn’t fluid and everything felt a bit stiff. Navigating the small amount of menu systems the game had was a pain and even the main menu isn’t 100% clear on what does what.

Combat is against various fantasy creatures such as skeletons, goblins, and bats. Guns are used by both the player and the enemies, however, they just shoot colorful circles. Some enemies on dying spew out a small amount of green goo and that’s as far as blood goes. Words are never spoken so there’s no reason to worry about language issues.

The only thing this game has going for it is the art style, but even that is hindered with colors sometimes meshing. On the outside this looked to be a fairly fun but standard run ‘n gun shooter, but once you’re playing it just isn’t worth putting time or money into.