Worn Out Spaces
HIGH Cool concept, solid fundamentals.
LOW Demonic, dismal UI. Boring cards. Confusing structure.
WTF Seriously, why is there a story at all?
The hardest reviews to write are the ones for the nearly-theres — the ambitious failures, the unsuccessful experiments, the polished messes, and the well-meaning shambles. They’re usually built on sound principles and timbered with good intention, but somehow, somewhere, something causes the whole experience to sink. Such a case is Knights in Tight Spaces.
This is a standalone sequel to Fights in Tight Spaces, a game that fused small-scale, position-based tactical battles with deckbuilding to evidently well-received effect — I haven’t played it.
KITS swaps out the modern-minimalist martial art aesthetic for a woodcut-inspired medieval world. There are knights, rogues, wizards, swords and boards, wands and wagons, flagons and flechettes, dungeons but, curiously, no dragons. Along with these trappings comes a new structure — a fusion of the Slay the Spire node board with some RPG-esque questing, party-building, and equipment.
It seems like a logical next step, and due props to Ground Shatter for taking something that worked and making an honest attempt at enriching it. But KITS, sadly, completely trips over its sabatons and exposes its whole ass like a character out of Rabelais.
First and most grievously — for a game that is ostensibly finished, the KITS UI and general readability is shockingly bad.
KITS takes obvious inspiration from Into the Breach, in the sense that its battles unfold in cramped arenas (they definitely delivered on the tight spaces) and positioning is key. Enemies move and telegraph their attacks, and then the player takes their turn. This is where the deckbuilding enters the formula.
Every character action is represented by a card, every card has an energy cost, and the deck is cycled through as the fight progresses — I really, really dislike saying “It’s basically like game X,” but, in a post-Breach, post-Spire landscape, all of this will seem Quite Familiar… KITS is one of those titles that finds its own identity by dovetailing signature mechanics from other games, and there’s nothing wrong with that — in principle.
Whereas both Breach and Spire transmuted the underlying density of their mechanics into beautifully luculent, readable interfaces, no single scrap of key information in KITS is where it should be, arranged how it should be, or at hand when it needs to be. Tiles where an enemy attack will land are marked with a subdued reticule that blends in with the rustic hues of the maps. Barring projectile attacks, there’s no way to tell at a glance which attack is coming from which well-cuisse’d cuss comprising the opposition.
In fact, nearly nothing can be seen at a glance. HP is not constantly displayed, there are no static damage prediction values, and the color-coding for cards and enemy archetypes is riotously borked. Characters have equipment that modifies the parameters of cards and those values are thus altered on the cards, but there’s no easy way to tell what piece of equipment or what skill is increasing/decreasing these values, and by how much. Enemies also have equipment, by the way, which modifies their attack/defense values, and god help the gormless player who wants to see that equipment, because they’re about to take a trip to sub-tab-within-a-tab Land, which I don’t need to point out is one of the worst theme parks in recorded history.
These may sound like nits, but there are a lot of nits, and eventually they swarm together and coalesce into whatever the nit equivalent of a rat king is — it’s a pulsing, pullulating, crawling mound of KITS nits.
Unfortunately, this confusion isn’t a symptom of any additional depth. In fact, there’s a leaden shallowness to KITS’s battles. They just… aren’t that exciting. Too many cards are tepid variants of other cards with numbers slightly tweaked. Positioning never has the razor-edged, nightmare chess energy of an Into the Breach. There’s an aching dearth of Power Turns where, through rigorous analysis and eloquent play, the golden thread of victory is seized and followed through a seemingly unwinnable tangle of dire enemy threats.
Also, far be it from me to kick a knight when he’s down, but I gotta say, the graphics just aren’t doing it for me.
The idea — tavern-smokey woodcut – is great, but the execution seems like RobinGoodfellowWoodcut.tex laid over Unity store rudiments. The characters don’t emote or react, and their faces have less emotional range than a blacksmith’s anvil. I don’t even think the ‘cinematic’ attack sequences are cool — there’s no pugilistic flair, no thudding frisson when sword meets gorget. Also, I think it’s just kind of dumb that fully armored knights are hopping around doing martial arts kicks — I wonder if some of these animations were brought straight over from FITS, because they seem incongruous to the setting.
“Setting,” by the way, would be a strong word for the world in KITS, much like “story” is a strong word for the narrative elements, or how “cutscenes” oversells what the text exchanges between the static medieval archetypes here achieve. I quite literally do not have the space, and mentally do not have the patience, to elaborate any further on the story trappings here. Come for the gameplay or don’t come at all.
That said, there is something worth coming for in KITS, somewhere. I sense there’s the makings of a good game in here, just below the surface. It shimmers at the periphery sometimes, when a particular turn almost lifts itself out of the morass of near-tedium, or when I nearly forget the messy menus and nigh-omnispresent obfuscation and can make my cool sword-guys fight other cool sword-guys in cool sword battles in cramped sword-spaces.
That’s all I wanted.
Maybe Ground Shatter will get KITS there after a few patches and updates, but right now, anybody picking this one up is in for a rough knight.
Rating: 4.5 out of 10
— Ben Schwartz
Disclosures: This game is developed by Ground Shatter and published by Raw Fury. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 8 hours were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: This game has not been rated by the ESRB. There is (obviously) a lot of fighting going on, and some comic book-adjacent blood and gore effects to go along with it. Some of the attacks have an element of pronounced brutality to them, but the game doesn’t linger on the suffering in any way and when a character dies, they fade away quickly. All in all, the mature elements are fairly low-key in the grand scheme of action/adventure media.
Colorblind Modes: Nothing officially called a ‘colorblind mode’ is available here, but there is an option to remove backdrop color.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All of the narrative elements in the game are text-based and not spoken, but the dialogue text cannot be resized. Enemies and player characters make sounds when attacking/being attacked, but KITS is a turn-based game so these sounds do not play any role whatsoever in comprehending the action. Text size for the card descriptions can be scaled up to 160% of their original value. I’d call it fully accessible.
Remappable Controls No, the game’s controls are not remappable. KITS can be controlled with either keyboard and mouse (or just the mouse), or a controller. In the former setup, clicking with the mouse accomplished pretty much every necessary function. The most important non-mouse action is using the Q key to rotate the map in quarter increments.
When using a controller, the left analog stick is used to flick between cards, select targets, etc. It ‘snaps’ to actions rather than merely control a cursor. The A button (or its equivalent) is confirm/left-click, while the other face and shoulder buttons fill hotkey functions for other common actions: the shoulder buttons rotate the camera, while right trigger and left trigger pull up the draw and discard piles, respectively. The Y button ends the turn and, while the controls cannot be altered, the game offers an option for making a long press on the Y button necessary to end the turn, rather than a single tap.
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