Cheap PC Gaming: Spiral Knights

Spiral Knights is a free to play MMORPG developed by Three Rings Design and Sega. It’s an action RPG to be more specific, so it plays much like Diablo and Torchlight in that it tends to forgo the strategy and commit instead to hitting things with weaponry.

[drop]Obviously, this isn’t a bad thing; hitting things is something we’re well versed at after gaming for so long and, indeed, something I happen to enjoy. This is far more than an MMO Diablo clone, however. Instead of levelling up your character, you level up your equipment. As the equipment levels up it gets more powerful (obviously) and can gain further bonuses at certain levels. To level your equipment, you must collect ’embers’ that are dropped by enemies and give you ‘heat’. Once you reach the end of the level of the Clockworks (more on that later) you’re in, it’ll be distributed amongst the equipment you have equipped.

Your equipment can also be used to craft more powerful equipment, provided you’ve got a recipe and the ingredients necessary. Alternatively you can sell it to a vendor or trade it with another player (provided you haven’t equipped it beforehand). You can also buy weapons from said vendors, believe it or not, and it tends to be a good idea to check what they have in stock regularly.

Now, for the Clockworks, which are essentially the dungeons in Spiral Knights. The idea behind Spiral Knights is that the entire planet the game is set on is hollow and inside lies, you guessed it, the Clockworks. You enter the Clockworks by using lifts (elevators, if you prefer) in the overworld and choosing a depth you want to start from. The deeper you go the more dangerous it gets, but the more heat you’ll find and the better the loot.

The levels themselves are fairly simple, with set paths that are floating over a rather nicely animated background of gears and other such clockwork wizardry. There is usually one main path and a few branching off for the people who want to explore to find more loot and more enemies to destroy.

[drop2]The Free to Play part comes in with energy. Energy is what powers the elevators that go down into the Clockworks, as well as enabling you to power some machines that can be found down there, craft items and revive yourself and your party members. Without energy you can’t go into dungeons, and when you run out you either wait 22 hours for your mist energy tank to regenerate or buy crystal energy. Crystal energy can be purchased with either cold hard cash, or in-game currency (crowns) from other players.

The game has quite a bit going for it, with a good amount of content, including a guild system and lots of levels in various environments for you to explore. It’s all backed up by a great art style and often looks gorgeous, especially when looking at the backgrounds to the dungeon levels where you’ll see cogs spinning and wheels turning. It might not take over your life, but it’s fun and, if you take some friends along, you could sink a whole lot of time into the Clockworks. Even without friends, there seems to always be a good amount of people online, and you can even join a guild if you’re into that kinda thing to find some like-minded people.

You can get the game from either the official website or Steam for the low price of free. It’ll run on Windows, Linux and OSX so you don’t really have any reason not to try it out if you’re interested…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQR6_Jv9pRI

System Requirements can be located here.