Did you love dungeon-crawling with your arcade buddies in Gauntlet?
Did you find the Legend of Zelda series fun and challenging, and never complained about it's "cutesy"-ness?
Do you like the social interaction and character-building aspects common in most modern-day MMORPGs, but aren't basement-bound geek enough to take them seriously?
Are you short on cash?
Do you want all this and have a ton of fun while you're at it?
Come, join up with the Spiral Knights and explore the ever-changing Clockworks world!
You have crashed.
You are stranded.
But you are not alone.
The Spiral Knights have awoken on an alien world. Their equipment stores have been raided and their starship, The Skylark, will not recover from the crash. Now they must work together to survive on a journey that will take them to the very core of this strange world.
It's written by
Three Rings, the creative hooligans behind
Puzzle Pirates and an upcoming Doctor Who game, in conjunction with Sega.
Most of the artwork has been perpetrated by Ian McConville, the creative genius behind the
Mac Hall and
Three Panel Soul webcomics.
It's browser-based, written in Java (which means it's Linux-compatible
), and offers very creative gameplay that seems to borrow from a fistful of enjoyable predecessors.
It's free-to-play, which means you can sign up and have access to everything you need.
You get 100 units of Energy every 24 hours (EVERYTHING you do costs Energy, some things very little, some a little more...), and at first sign-up they give you a free 100-unit bonus tank for the first time you run out.
I recommend playing as much as you can with the free energy to learn the best energy-conserving tricks, get used to the game mechanics and trading system, then buy some extra Energy for extended play.
The energy pricing is fair and not terribly expensive (you can spend as little as 2 bucks) and they take PayPal as well as the traditional options (they even take a check in the mail
).
I've been playing for a couple weeks now, and having a blast even though I can only spare an hour or two at a time, which is just about perfect.
I don't know enough about the game yet to give it a comprehensive review (there's just so much to it...) but here's a good overview from Giantbomb.com:
http://www.giantbomb...al-knights/61-34489/And if you search "spiral knights review", you'll find most of the reviews to be quite positive.
http://www.google.co...piral+knights+reviewI also recommend the Wiki as your first stop; it's well-written, comprehensive and updated often.
http://wiki.spiralknights.comGo through the Starting Out page first, to get an idea of what to do when you get around to signing up (don't forget to hit all the links at least once):
http://wiki.spiralkn...hts.com/Starting_out... then read through the New Player Briefing to get a good overview of gameplay mechanics that you will experience:
http://wiki.spiralkn.../New_Player_BriefingWhether your cup of tea is engaging in fast-paced combat, building your character, or interacting with others via trading or chit-chatting, it's all possible within this game world, and I highly recommend it for the "fun" gamer in you...
Ready? Good!
https://www.spiralkn...register/register.wm 
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