THE PLUCKY SQUIRE is a game I wanted to love but ended up hate quitting.
Nintendo shouldn’t hold the monopoly on fantastic platformers. We can have rare exceptions like this year’s ASTRO BOT take GOTY, and that is okay. However, I get frustrated when critics like mediocre games because of the animation, original story, and intent.
On paper, THE PLUCKY SQUIRE should be a bonafide hit. It has everything that you’d want from a platformer. It looks and feels like ZELDA. Mixing 2D and 3D platformer elements in various creative storybook ways. The boss battles are a throwback to old video games, and the ingenuity of the setup should’ve been enough to hook gamers.
Where THE PLUCKY SQUIRE fails is in three categories:
- Gameplay – It’s atrocious. Significant lag occurs when a user presses a button, and the animation happens on the screen. This works for some elements, but in heated battles where timing is essential, you will end up dying. And I’m not talking about the type of deaths that occur because it teaches you to improve. I’m talking about the ones where the gameplay is so frustrating that you want to throw your controller.
- Chatty Characters – The characters in THE PLUCKY SQUIRE talk a lot. While they are entertaining at times, for the most part, they repeat similar themes that don’t advance users back to the playable sections quickly enough.
- Lack of fun—When my initial enthusiasm for the visual style faded, I felt empty. None of the elements were that fun to play, and instead of staying up late at night to see what comes next (ala ASTRO BOT), playing SQUIRE felt like a chore.
If you pick up the PLUCKY SQUIRE, do yourself a favor and play it in the easy difficulty setting. It’s not because the original settings are that hard; it’s more so you can breeze through it as quickly as possible and move on to the next game that earns your time.
I played SQUIRE on the Switch and encountered a few technical issues. The game crashed on me twice, and at several different points, I was forced to quit because the screen locked in a position that didn’t allow me to move forward.
