When Knights Onrush was released, the developer put in a little extra time to create A Quest Of Knights Onrush; a free promotional game that adopted a side scrolling hack and slash style. It was so successful that people began to ask for a full game based around it; Knight’s Rush is the final product.

What Knight’s Rush has in spades is variety. Lavish backgrounds with enemies and obstacles to match, three different characters with their own unique skills, and three modes; the main campaign, an endless mode where you can see how far you travel in one of the worlds, or the super endless mode; a random character placed in a random world with random enemies; you never know what to expect!

The three characters include a lightweight knight with a sword, a medium weight hero with twin scythe-like blades and a heavyweight warrior who carries a large axe. Each of them have their own abilities including a unique special attack and magic attack, plus their own perks; skills that can allow you to gain more experience per kill, or to randomly shoot fire every so often for example. In addition, you can pick up items from green chests scattered across the environment; items including mines, bombs, dynamite toting animals and freeze spells. You’ll find yourself relying on all of these as the sheer volume of enemies on the screen is determined to take you out with any means at their disposal.

Indeed, there are many structures and fortifications that you can only use basic attacks on even though it may make sense to be able to use an item to take them out. Things like arrow and cannonball launchers and even barrels. Not that it isn’t fun hacking your way through a spiked wooden obstacle hanging from the ceiling and watching the wood fly, but on the later levels the difficulty spikes and you really need to be able to take out anything with everything you’ve got.

What’s great about the game is that it manages keep your hero balanced by resetting all of the skills and perks every time you begin in a new world of the campaign; this gives you plenty of opportunity to try out each one and see how their abilities work with your fighting style. But happily, you can pick any of them and it the difficulty isn’t impacted because of your choice; we had equal success and failure with each of the heroes.

The selection of enemies in the game is nothing short of astounding; giant spiders who can trap you in sticky webs, mages who spam bullets and almost always require a special attack to take out, golden knights riding on horses, scorpions, giant crabs, explosive barrel toting plebs and balls of slime are amongst the many that you will face. The bosses are equally impressive but are often extremely easy when compared to the rest of the campaign.

But the game isn’t without its problems, unfortunately; minor bugs include an upgrade window that dismisses itself prematurely (you have to keep selecting the window every time you apply a perk or skill), ability confusion near the end of the game (you get the knight’s abilities sometimes even when you’re playing as someone else) and the game’s save system is really flaky. Sometimes your abilities and perks reset when you quit out of the game and open it back up again; when you die you’re prompted to start the level over with an inexperienced character—and when you select ‘yes’ you begin at the start of the room that you died on with no abilities or perks—why? It just makes the game harder! Hopefully we’ll see these issues addressed in a forthcoming update because they let down the otherwise solid experience Knight’s Rush has to offer.

To wrap, Knight’s Rush looks great, plays great and is overall a game that’s full of fun. Even after completing the campaign mode, you’ll definitely want to spend some more time with the two endless modes to see how far you can get; and you’ll be rewarded with what is a great package for just £1.79.

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Knights Onrush, A

Review by Ben Briggs, June 30, 2009

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