Kogent Knight

OK, for the first Big Mean Flash Gamer review, I decided to go with a game that has been around for a couple of years now, but which, whenever I play it, annoys me as much now as it did the first time - Kogent Knight.

The plot is nothing particularly original, but that's OK, because there's very little you can do with the whole medieval platformer anyway. You play a knight, and it's your first day on the job.



Apparently, though, you're something of a lazy sod, not even capable of getting to a meeting with the friggin' queen on time. Anyway, it's probably not a bad thing, as you happen to see a bunch of bandits make off with the princess.



Oh yes, rather than rush to the meeting and assemble the rest of the knights for a daring rescue, you decide to head off on your own. And oh, you're also illiterate as well as stupid. I know the intro is trying to be funny but I'm not buying it, such is my dislike for this game.

Anyway, you start the game and proceed to strike and block your way through eight of the easiest levels in the history of platform games. I swear to God, if you actually have difficulty getting past any of the monsters you meet in this game, you are either a moron or a two-year-old. None of the enemies pose much, if any, challenge.



You meet plenty of these trolls along the way, and other than the fact that they like to take cheap shots at you, they really aren't difficult at all.



Uh oh, it's a black knight! And as we all know, black knights are tough bastards, right? Right?

Yeah, not in this game.



Woah, check out this guy with the sickle! He looks pretty badass!

Well, yeah, he looks pretty badass, until you whack him a couple of times. Then he turns into a black ball, which explodes before giving you money. And yeah, I know how nuts that sounds.



The only enemy that poses any threat is the guy with the boomerang, because he can attack you from a distance. But once you get close enough you can take him down easily, and besides, you won't see him until the jungle levels.

Wait, jungle levels? And then after that you go through the desert. Jesus, how far away did they take this princess?

You press S for a light attack, A for a heavy attack, and D to defend. None of the controls will pose any trouble, and the fact that you can just load Kogent Knight up and immediately begin playing is a plus. Of course, once you start playing, you'll wonder why you bothered.

My biggest problem with the game is the red Stamina bar at the top. Every time you attack you lose some stamina. The good news is that if you don't press the attack buttons your stamina will regenerate. Unfortunately, the easiest way to do this is to just stand around. So you wait...



And you wait...



And you wait! The game will take you about twenty minutes to play from start to finish, and half that time involves waiting around for the fucking Stamina bar to fill up again!

"But who cares if it's a little low?" you may ask. "Why not just keep walking?"

Because if your Stamina bar is too low, this happens:



YOU HAVE A FUCKING ASTHMA ATTACK!!

Oh my God! I am playing an illiterate asthmatic moron!

But it gets so much better, dear readers. Throughout the levels you collect coins (or rather, little silver spirals) which you can then use at the shop, which is handily located at the end of each level.



I only noticed this now, but the knight is as tall as the shop. Must be run by dwarves, or something. When I first came to the shop at the end of Act 1, I tried everything to get in. I pressed buttons, I clicked on it, but nothing happened. I figured it must be a glitch of some kind. But no, it wasn't. Sometimes you just can't get enter the shop. There's no real explanation for this.



On some levels there's a big "Closed" sign on the shop. OK, so what was the point of including the shop on the level at all, then, other than it meant the developers didn't have to go to the trouble of removing the graphic. God damn, not even I'm that lazy.

When you finally do get to enter the shop, you're presented with a choice of three weapons you can buy.



And that's it. Apparently this shop only has three items for sale. No wonder they're closed half the time.

Another nice little item in the game are the treasure chests.



The treasure chests contain mazes, which you have to complete. I thought that was a little strange - usually you get a maze or map to the treasure chest, and then it's just a case of opening it and taking the treasure inside. But not in Kogent Knight! Not even these pose much of a challenge, as they're piss easy.



For the love of God, what is that? Just some advise, if you do play this game despite this review - don't open the first chest. The reward for completing a maze is three health points, and you won't need them. On top of that, every time you complete the first treasure chest, a hobgoblin appears out of thin air and whacks you across the back of the head.



What the fuck!? You'll notice that when you're hit, you flicker white, and as you can clearly see, I'm getting my ass handed to me by a friggin' goblin, who must have been hiding in wait inside the treasure chest. Gee, what a great surprise.

Anyway, if - I mean, when you get through the meadows and jungles and deserts, you'll find yourself in Sinister Valley (oo-ooo-ooohh!) And it's here that we meet an old staple of the genre, the moving platform.

But these are very special moving platforms, because, unlike the platforms in every other game of this type, you need to keep walking to stay on them!

And do you know what happens if you stop walking while they're moving?



You slide right off and down into a fucking pit! And what sucks most of all is that at the bottom of these pits are interdimensional portals that send you to the very beginning of the level again. Which wouldn't be so boring if you had to fight your back to where you fell. But no - you just walk across an empty terrain. In fact, the penultimate level is just that - you walk across a flat area until you get to the princess, unconscious and tied to a chair.

I was going have some screenshots of the final level because it's funny as hell (while rocks fly out of the sky you hold the princess, still tied to the chair, over your head and jump across more moving platforms that you still need to walk on as they move) but I fell into a pit and lost. Yeah, that's right, after wasting my time for twenty minutes, the easiest platformer on the face of God's green earth finally decides to up the difficulty. You have to jump through this final level in thirty seconds, and if you fall into a pit once, forget it, because the game sends you right to the fucking start again, and there's no way you can complete this level in less than twenty-five to thirty seconds!

I can say that I have beaten the game before, and let me tell you, after all the bullshit you go through playing this game, the payoff isn't worth squat. Even though you saved the princess and defeated the monsters, you still get punished for missing the meeting and have to scrub the castle floors.

Read that last paragraph again, and then wonder at how pissed off I was when I saw that little message. I could have lived with all the crappy gameplay, easy monsters and complicated final level if I had just gotten a happy ending. But no.

Do not play Kogent Knight - there are a dozen better platform games out there. This may look pretty, but it's boring as all hell. Do yourself a favour, heed my advice, and go play something like Fancy Pants Adventure, because at least it's fun.