When playing any platformer, any gamer would want a great story, maybe challenging and addicting gameplay, and great music and atmosphere. Exploring Sir Lovelot was a refreshing experience and served as a reminder on what any good platforming game should aim to be. While I wanted to love this game, it was a pretty underwhelming experience for me, and overall left me feeling disappointed. That being said there was a lot of potential for the developers to build on if they move forward with the entry. The game was developed and published by pixel.lu and Sometimes You, and can be bought on all platforms for 9.99 USD.
You play as a knight known as Sir Lovelot, whom takes on a quest to find the love of his life. There really is not much to the story, for you travel place to place giving damsels flowers in order to spend the night with them. Once you go through various obstacles to get these flowers and deliver them, you are then kicked out come morning and repeat this cycle. Unfortunately, this gets pretty repetitive as there really is no switch up other than a change in layout of each area, and increased difficulty and length to get to your objectives. You fight monsters and avoid various traps along your journey, such as weird ooze-like creatures, deadly plants, weird fish, stationary spikes and moving saws. I will commend the artwork for the various locations, and the backgrounds were very beautifully designed. The only issue is you would keep these similar colored backgrounds until you reached the next chapter. This would not be an issue IF you didn’t have to complete twenty different and increasingly longer areas each round before you reached your next chapter. The story basis is cute and had potential, however the execution fell short, overall causing the game to suffer a bit.
Another issue I had with the game is the gameplay itself. The game is an Indie platformer and shooter, but it lacks in actual combat and gameplay overall. You only get two actions, which is directional shooting and jumping. You can obviously climb and slide as well but as far as controls go there is not much to it. You don’t get any other special abilities, and are forced to just shoot the enemy continuously until they die which makes a fairly satisfyingly popping-like noise. This would not be a huge issue for me if there was more to the exploration and creativity of obstacles. The maps do jump up in difficulty fairly fast, which is nice but unfortunately there is not much towards exploration and strategy when you go into each area. For example, when you play Rogue Legacy you at least have a lot of exploration and get various abilities, or even playing Hallow Knight you have various bosses and a variety of cool collectibles along the way. In games like these there are endless possibilities and directions to go, with cool areas to discover. This game suffers from similarly structured obstacles and the only hidden collectibles for this game in particular are goose eggs that are hidden behind secret walls. Overall the game as I said previously had plenty of potential, but honestly in the end felt lazy and almost linear.
Overall it was not a terrible experience, as I did enjoy the difficulty increase, and I also loved the artwork. I just would have liked to have seen more to the combat, exploration and obstacles. I also feel like the game would have benefitted more with a cooler change of scenery and more directions to travel. That would have made the game feel less linear, and leave you feeling less stuck with each level change. The game also did not create that same addictive, adventurous feeling like most other platformers give you, if anything it just made me feel like I wanted to get through the game almost as if it were a burden. I wanted to complete this game, but unfortunately I felt no desire to return after spending a couple days on it. I can honestly recommend this game for those where a bargain price point is important and just want to economically kill time, but for those who don’t mind spending a little more and love to explore there are far better recommendations. That being said, it’s not a bad game by any means, it just leaves much to be desired in a platformer.
DVS Score: 4/10
Veteran gamer, tech nerd, comic addict, anime lover, and just your average introverted weeb.
