Knights in Tight Spaces review

Fights in Tight Spaces was a turn-based John Wick deckbuilder. Sounds ridiculous, but amazingly, it worked. Each turn you had three ‘momentum’ which could be spent on cards that punched, kicked, and slammed heads into a nice variety of painful surfaces. You had to balance using your precious momentum to smack foes around or moving yourself into a safe position.

Easier said than done, as the ‘tight spaces’ of the title were no misnomer and it was easy to get yourself boxed in by foes. If you could master movement in this one, though, you’d be laughing, because the game’s best idea was shoving and booting opponents into each other’s line of fire. Then you’d end your turn and watch gleefully as the dopes beat each other to a pulp for you.

For this sequel, we’ve left the Superhot-meets-Casino-Royale-Bond aesthetic to go play in the world of fantasy. Knights, rogues, wizards, and all your favourite tropes are ready to bash skeletons, rock monsters, and bog-standard blokes around new tight spaces.

The title is a solid pun and it’s certainly not an ugly game. But I can’t help thinking that this has a similar problem to Metaphor Refantazio, wherein something special has been lost by shifting from such a unique style to the endlessly covered ground of medieval fantasy.

At least this plays just as well as its predecessor. For quite a while, near exactly like its predecessor, depending on who you start off with. The Brawler relies on punches, kicks, and other flavours of attack that’ll feel very familiar to anyone who played Fights. My beloved old tricks, like shoving enemies into each other's line of fire, worked like a charm. Still fun, but I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and this to start feeling more like a sequel.

Luckily, when the other shoe did drop, it dropped harder than one of the game’s brutal leaping kicks. There’s two more interesting characters to try (with more to be found), and eventually you unlock the ability to recruit more party members at taverns. Each party member adds another pair of fighting hands and an extra momentum point each turn, but also another vulnerable liability that you have to keep safe from harm. Thankfully, they more than earn their keep by bringing lots of fun new toys to these scraps.

The Fighter can equip weapons and armor, giving them vast damage bonuses and a shield that regenerates each turn, which is ridiculously useful when learning the ropes. Rogues can wield bows for distant strikes, and have all sorts of sneaky moves. This includes possibly my favorite card in the whole game that makes enemies change direction and then hit whatever poor sap is standing there. Sorcerers have weaker melee strikes but more than make up for that with their lightning strikes, healing, and power to teleport to safety.

Naturally all this new power has a price, and that’s a steadily expanding bestiary of foes. The soldiers, thieves, and other human enemies you face off in the opening hours could have easily been in the last game (an archer is just a reskinned gun user, really), but these gradually give way to witches who shoot fireballs, or cowards who summon skeletons to fight for them.

Once you’ve got a varied trio of heroes going up against more interesting mystical enemies, this sequel starts to sing. The stress of trying to scrape out a win in a battle without permanently losing a party member is wonderfully tense, capturing that XCOM magic.

And life is truly cheap in this roguelike. You’re only ever a turn foolishly ended by an open window away from being shoved out of it and losing hours of progress. Then it’s all the way back to the start. Par for the course in this mean little genre, naturally, but it’s often a lot of hours to lose and the crucial test of one of these games is whether you want to jump straight back in for another go.

Often I did, especially with new starter character unlocks to try and different weapons and armor to experiment with. But the campaign is still a little too rigid to stop repetitiveness sinking in faster than I’d like. The previous game had you facing off against a series of gangs. Once you took down a gang, you’d unlock the next one, and could start new runs from there. Problem was, you’d be at starter health and with no new or upgraded cards, making starting from later on in the campaign a difficulty spike that was usually too frustrating to overcome.

Knights ‘solves’ that issue by simply removing this option entirely. Die, and it’s alllll the way back to the start. That’s not exactly the most elegant solution and a newfound love of storytelling feels equally ill-advised. Why do I have to skip through the same bloody conversation with the bartender every time I start a new run?

At least different playable characters change up the responses a little, but you’re still going to find yourself rereading the same generic fantasy visual novel to get to the fights. Side quests mix things up a bit, but repeated levels (didn’t I just finish a fight in this dining hall?) and story beats make me rarely up for a third run after losing two.

The world’s only perfect videogame, Slay the Spire, solved this ages ago by mixing up the encounters and boss fights you’d potentially see, and making sure no two fights on a run felt the same. It’s frustrating, because there’s another great game in here. One that starts too similarly to the last, then gradually starts blossoming into a worthy sequel. But the deckbuilder genre is in rude health right now, and Knights’ flaws make it not quite up there with the greats.