Whenever I play Minecraft, I end up being constructive for about 60-70% of my session, before becoming bored and deciding to break everything. It’s a great game for creation and exercising videogame free will, but I find that the fact that it doesn’t hand me stuff to do on a plate causes me to enjoy the experience less than other people clearly do. Thankfully, with games such as Dragon Quest Builders and now, Portal Knights, developers are starting to insert objective into these games, giving players such as myself something to aim for and work towards.
In the case of Portal Knights, as the title suggests, your goal in each world is to acquire enough portal blocks to reactivate a portal to the next island, with 47 in total to explore, mine, and build in. One of the biggest advantages that Portal Knights has over Minecraft is the fact that each of these worlds feels unique from the one before it, due to aesthetic, enemy type and the availability of resources. To become as powerful as you can be, and to unlock every creation opportunity, you have to work your way through many different islands, collecting various resources as you go.
This progression through islands is matched by character progression, as you gradually unlock the ability to forge new armor, weapons, furniture etc., and you also gain experience to level up your character and their abilities. Each level increase provides you with a stat boost, which you can use as you see fit, and occasionally you also unlock new traits and specializations, such as focusing on a particular type of combat or being able to regenerate health after remaining stationary for a set period of time. There’s plenty of opportunity here to make your character feel like your own, and as you progress through the game, the specializations begin to become more acute. If you’re playing with a group of friends, you can certainly create a party of unique skillsets, making it feel as if you’re part of a team, rather than a series of individuals that just happen to be working together.
Unfortunately, the varied nature of Portal Knights’ different islands has the downside of the fact that they’re not particularly large, despite having structures and caves to explore and delve into. One of Minecraft’s biggest advantages is its seemingly endless worlds, where you load a single iteration of a world and then explore to your heart’s content. Portal Knights sees a lot of jumping from world to world, and though this does bring a good sense of variety and excitement to see what’s next, it can be frustrating, especially as the loading times between worlds aren’t particularly quick. I can understand that the developer perhaps doesn’t want players to settle on one world and not move on, but for a genre that prides itself on creation and a sense of ownership, it’s a shame that it always seems to be pushing you on to the next experience.
Portal Knights makes me feel like a bit of a hypocrite, in that I enjoy the sense of progression that it provides, but don’t enjoy the fact that I feel the need to progress, at the expense of a feeling of ownership. I realize that this is as much an issue of my own making as of an issue with the experience that the game provides, but nevertheless, this is perhaps the strongest feeling that I took away from the game. Once every island has been unlocked, and this feeling of seeing what’s around the corner has been eliminated, I might be able to sit back and focus on what the game has to offer, but by that point I’d have already seen everything and will likely have spent enough time with the game to feel ready to move on.
Portal Knights, like my approach to it, seems to be stuck between sticking and twisting, unsure of whether to encourage players to stay where they are or to see what’s next. It’s a decent building simulation, but I find that every time I play a game in a similar vein to Minecraft, the main purpose that they serve is to remind me how good of a creation Minecraft itself is.
