Portal Knights

[h1][b]Portal Knights[/b][/h1] [h3][b]Time Played:[/b][/h3] 45.7 Hours [h3][b]Last Played:[/b][/h3] 2nd of January, 2026 [hr][/hr] Once upon a time, the year was 2010, I was 14, and had just discovered both Minecraft and Terraria. While the “how” was lost to memory, I eventually was made known of a then-untitled game by Wolfram Von Funke/Wollay, that seemed to be a fusion of those other two games. This rapidly became one of my most anticipated titles, as it seemed to take all the elements I loved of both titles, and expand upon them to vast degrees. Unfortunately, this would also be my first taste of vapourware, as one day, the updates simply stopped after the name was unveiled to be “Cube World”. This eventually did “release”, however, as a sad tale of allegedly (I still don't own it) compromised systems, and broken promises put on-market to say it was “finished”, and nothing more. Eventually, though, I cam across Portal Knights, which both seemed to be everything that promised, and befitting of the then-ongoing 2025 December Holiday Season. [h3][b]Yay:[/b][/h3] + Charming-to-me graphics... + ...and art direction. + Character creator is present. + 3 races, though this is purely-cosmetic, unlike say, the Elder Scrolls series. + 5 classes, each with their own weapons, armour, and crafting stations. + Talents are had in addition to skill point allocation on levelling up. + Lots of biomes to keep one interested. + I found exploration fun, and rewarding. + Dungeons with hidden treasures exist. + Ability to build things. + One can upgrade all crafting stations. + Visually-varied enemies + Many different attacks on them, too. + Seasonal portals that bring you to festive realms. + Has both mandatory, and optional bosses, these being interesting to me. + Tonnes of quests, and time-limited special-occurrences. + Each biome has a player-bought island equivalent for building, and farming. + One can swap to first-person view for building, and mining. + Mounts that up player speed are available. + Hidden portals also exist. [h3][b]Meh:[/b][/h3] ~ Combat was meh to me, it boiling down to “slash a few times, and wait for them to start an attack, dodge out, then repeat”. ~ Some weapon types, especially for the rogue, are lacking in instances. ~ Some seeds can only grow in their respective biome, removing an all-in-one base. ~ First Person mode seems to be only for the two above-mentioned tasks, as it boots you out of it when engaging in combat. ~ The third-person combat cam likes to freak out near walls. ~ I had 0 idea how to access the non-expanding DLC, so that went entirely-unexperienced. ~ Some enemies as the rogue can near-instantly destroy you. ~ One needs to farm for portal shards to make blocks to activate the next gateway/area. ~ Islands are rather shallow, so one cannot do much by way of basement-building. ~ No auto-sort feature ~ No guide/recipe book. ~ Searching for something also does not exist, nor do the stations at which you craft things always make sense, leading you to need to dig to locate recipes, and the like. [h3][b]Nay:[/b][/h3] - Nowhere near as many block types as Minecraft, Terraria, or Starbound. - Coupling the above with the fact player-bought Islands never spawn enemies, I did not feel a need to build anything but dirt bridges during any of the 44 hours spent within. - Some achievements are ridiculously-grindy, or very particular/difficult. Just looking at the descriptions of them made me realise the wiser choice was to walk away when I was done, rather than force myself to mine 43,000 more blocks, do 177 more event quests, and wait until the Rabbit Armour was possible to get, much less make, and eat a carrot while wearing. - Dungeons types are limited, and also don't match their biome's blocks, making you able to see wooden mines in places they do not even slightly fit. - Player freedom, in terms of weaponry, construction expression, or build variety, also seems to be lacking. - Unless you picked Rogue, you need to do a separate playthrough, and farm to level 30 with that class to get all achievements. - No option to build all/buy all of anything, meaning you need to spam a button to make portal blocks, or buy all of a vendor's items. - An in-game Bestiary with drops, and rates does not exist. - Quest Markers, are also not a thing, and some steps are way more vague than I feel they should be, leading to me needing to look up what to do on more than one occasion. - No way exists to pause completely, save for returning to the title screen. [hr][/hr] [h3][b]Verdict:[/b][/h3] While I very much think some of the achievements in this were decided, rather than attempted, and thus cannot recommend it to those that must have every achievement, if you realise, and walk away like I did, you'll find an experience that did not delight me to the heights of Terraria, Minecraft, or even Starbound, but one that I'm still glad I played. [h3][b]Placed in:[/b][/h3] 2: Amicably-Approved.