Karma Knight is all about fast, dexterous action and demands that you learn its mechanics to make it all the way to the end. You choose from one of two playable characters at the start and proceed through twelve stages, each one a gauntlet of enemies and platforming challenges. You come equipped with a main weapon, partially invulnerable dash, three special attacks, and a "shift" ability that allows you to launch yourself in the air when near special lotus flowers (more on this later). As you progress you will accumulate a few different currencies that can be traded in for various upgrades--higher weapon damage, more health, more stamina for special attacks, etc. Among the stages are various items that will unlock even more offensive and defensive options, and while they're not exactly hidden, you will need to explore the limited branches off the main path in order to find them.
Karma Knight's greatest achievement is in delivering truly compelling combat and platforming in one package. The fighting is kinetic, with your character zipping from one enemy to the next in a balletic froth of slashes and split-second evasive maneuvers. It's important to prioritize enemies according to threat level, as you are rarely facing only one or two at a time, and in the later levels you will be overwhelmed if you aren't using every part of your kit. One of the masterstrokes of the controlled chaos on offer here is how even your special attacks can and should be used for their evasive properties; even your defense is active.
Interspersed with all the fisticuffs are some devious platforming challenges. These start out with the basics: jumping over pits/spikes, dashing through the air to land on narrow ledges, and wall jumping while avoiding hazards. Further on, though, you'll find yourself also managing the extra momentum of icy surfaces, madly running from rising lava, or riding on directional rails. Some of the longer gauntlets are palm-moistening affairs wherein you must string together every trick in your bag to make it through, and the satisfaction of success is oh so tasty. We're not talking Meatboy-level difficulty here, but it's edging into that territory.
Crucially, these two pillars of Karma Knight--the combat and the parkour--are kept separate for the most part. You're either fighting or flying, so the game avoids the particular frustration that arises from something like Ninja Gaiden (damn birds!). That is not to say that it doesn't feature some frustrations of its own, though. There are some design choices and emergent behavior that elicited PG-13 to R-rated exclamations from me.
By far the most annoying of these is one that comes up quite often, unfortunately: the "shift" lotuses. To illustrate simply, imagine two ledges separated by a gap that is too long for you to clear with a jump. Placed in the air between the ledges is a lotus that, when you are close enough, will trigger a prompt that lets you execute a mid-air "shift", shooting you forward with enough momentum to make it to the far ledge. It wouldn't be a stretch to say this is the game's gimmick, as all of the platforming and much of the combat revolves around it. The issue is that the proximity at which the prompt appears is unintuitive. It can appear when your character is surprisingly far ahead of (or beyond) the lotus but disappears when you are closer to it. It's a bit hard to explain, but suffice to say that even by the end of the game, after interacting with this mechanic hundreds of times, I would still misjudge this distance occasionally and fall to my death.
The blasted lotus things can also mess you up when fighting enemies. Often you are fighting enemies on lower and upper levels, and the lotuses are placed inbetween to give you a method for reaching the enemies above. The problem lies in the fact that the prompt for the "shift" is tied to the same button as your primary attack, so you will frequently find yourself zipping about crazily when you were just trying to smack something. Another pain-point worth mentioning is how chaotic fights can get when lots of enemies are on-screen. It becomes difficult to find openings to attack at times because of how many things you need to dodge in sequence. My final criticism is that there are some rare situations where you can get stun-locked by alternating enemy attacks that leave you helpless as you watch your life bar drain to zero.
Karma Knight is a tight, movement-based action platformer that hits a lot more than it misses. It feels like the developer should have tuned the lotus proximity issue either during testing or after launch, something they've shown a willingness to do; one of the post-launch patches reduced the hitbox on the ubiquitous spikes, for example. That said, in the end I think you'll find that your twitchy gamer center has been wonderfully stimulated with this one.
Score: 8/10
