Game: Floppy Knights
Genre: Deckbuilder, Adventure, Strategy
System: Steam ( Windows, macOS) (also available for Xbox and Xbox Game Pass)
Developers | Publishers: Rose City Games
Age Rating: US E 10+ | EU 7+
Price: US $ TBC | UK £ TBC | EU € TBC
Release Date: May 24th, 2022
Review code used, with many thanks to Stride PR.
Floppy Knights is a deck builder strategy game in a unique cartoon style. This game is challenging and filled with fun and unique characters, making it one of the games I was impatiently waiting to release.
The Story
Phoebe is a clever inventor and the main character of Floppy Knights. She has invented an army of little projections that can battle, move, and interact with the world around them. She has decided to use this invention to help her take care of some of the freelance jobs around town and hopes to help her win the science tournament taking place soon.
Gameplay of Floppy Knights
This strong female lead character has a sidekick, a computerized arm named Carlton, that helps her to upgrade, launch, and use her Floppy Knights to battle against all manner of evil. These two heroes are ready to take on the whole world if it means getting a paycheck.
Playing the game is a mix between the best parts of deckbuilding games like Slay the Spire, Roguebook, and others in the genre. Players choose a commander, similar to the commanders in EDH or Commander in Magic: the Gathering. If the commander of the deck dies, players lose and must try again.
Each commander comes with unique cards that fuel their particular niche, like healing their friends, dealing massive amounts of damage, or switching the stats of their army. The Floppy Knights are then put into battle against all kinds of monsters in a Final Fantasy Tactics or Triangle Strategy kind of battle. Positioning is paramount to winning battles and bringing home the bacon.
This game is extremely challenging, emphasising choosing the correct commander and updating your deck for each and every battle. Some of the battles were really difficult, and I was forced to redo my whole deck and tweak how I had been positioning my units. This type of challenge made the game extremely interesting and a lot of fun, if frustrating at times.
The Brains Behind the Game
This game was created by the artistic mind behind Dicey Dungeons, which is a game that I absolutely adored the aesthetics for. So it’s probably no surprise that I jumped on Floppy Knight‘s demo as soon as it was available. I have been waiting a long time for this game to come out, and I am both honored and very excited to be able to review it for LadiesGamers.
And what a game it turned out to be. This blend of turn-based tactics with card slinging is something I didn’t even know I wanted until I played the demo. It makes for an interesting kind of RNG to this game that is frustrating, difficult, and really, really fun. It’s easy to tell that this game was lovingly rendered by fans of both the genres with beautiful characters and a lively playstyle, and I enjoyed just about every minute of this game.
That being said, it certainly wasn’t perfect.
Problems in Floppy Town
Floppy Knights had a few issues that disappointed me while playing the full game. I really wanted to be able to tweak and tailor my deck to the card, but for the plant and monster decks, at least, it looks like there are an awful lot of cards you can’t remove from your deck. I understand why there are so many locked movement cards; you need to be able to move your Floppy Knights around the board in order to even dream of winning. But it would be nice to be able to replace those movement cards with better movement cards, at least.
As someone who has played Magic: the Gathering for decades, I understand how easy it can be to accidentally hobble yourself by forgetting to include something in your deck. But forcing players to use five or six-movement cards isn’t really a way to fix that. Just like there is no rule in EDH forcing players to have a certain amount of each color mana, Floppy Knights shouldn’t lock quite so many cards to prevent the player from accidentally preventing themselves from winning.
Some Bugs
There is a lot of wasted time in this game; there does not seem to be a way to fast forward through the enemy turn. Also, when you are guaranteed a win because there are no enemies left on the board, it doesn’t always give you the win. This is something that I would have added, especially since this game is hard enough that you will be playing the same fights over and over.
However, I also ran into a couple of bugs while playing Floppy Knights. The first bug that locked the game for me occurred when losing a battle.
Every time when I was sure I was going to lose a battle, I would go into the menu to hit the “retry” button. If I lost the game while in the menu, the game would hard lock, making me to force quit the game and boot it back up to try again. It didn’t happen often, but every time I lost while in the menu, which was frustrating.
Another issue I experienced was a massive amount of lag. I have a gaming laptop that is fairly new and contains an SSD. So I know it is not the lack of computing power on my end. When in battles with large amounts of creatures, the game would stutter to a halt for several seconds before resuming movement. One of my units suddenly had the wrong attack pattern, some issues with being unable to press buttons sometimes during battles, and other small bugs.
Conclusion
Based on these problems, I couldn’t give this lovely game a perfect score. I love the game. The look, the art, the characters, and everything else about it, though, so I’m going to give this amazing title a “I Like It a Lot.” I really hope these issues are fixed soon!
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot.
