Knight of Pen and Paper 2 is the second part of the series published by Paradox Interactive. I bought the game on sale for around 2€. The game is best described as an old school round based rpg game. Its available in slightly different versions for Steam, Nintendo Switch and Xbox and as a free game on IOS and Android.
A pixel art dream – Game appearance
You play in a very beautiful drawn “pixely” environment with a static table in the middle. During battle there also some very nice fight animations.
The music is amazing but some of the sound effects like the fight completion sound can get annoying when you hear them to often.
Because of the pixel graphics and the fact that the pc version was “created”/published after the mobile version this can run on nearly any device.
Kill X in Y – Gameplay and Story
The base game took me around 8 hours to complete and the expansions another 8. With the expansions you just unlock new quest, characters, items and map areas. The basic gameplay idea is always the same: Quest mostly evolve around killing a certain amount of monster either for their loot or just for the sake of it. Sometimes you just need to talk to certain npc and travel or transport some items from A to B. Characters are controlled using buttons so you only need a mouse to play this game 😉
In Knights of Pen and Paper 2 you travel around the land of Papero to different locations with different monster, NPCs and quests.
The main goal in the base game is to defeat the paper knight who wants to take over the world you are playing in. In the DLCs there are other story lines but I don’t want to spoil too much as it’s way more fun to discover it for yourself.
You can sleep nearly everywhere to regain health points and energy. There also also dungeons in which you can’t heal and need to clear rooms on multiple floors to gain rewards. These are hard to clear at the beginning but a good source of experience points when you need a higher level for a quest. While traveling you might also stumble across some hidden encounters or ambushes.
Experience points are earned by completing quests and battles. If you gain enough for a level up you can invest skill points. Every character has two active and two passive skills you can improve and two normal passive skills. In the beginning its a good idea to concentrate on one skill for each character so you can use them effectively.
Your efficiency in battle is also based on health and energy stats and your battle values are calculated based on the 3 attributes: Body, Senses and Mind. You can increase these later in the game using certain equipment but it is import to choose the “right” combination of character class, race and type.
The fights themself vary in difficulty so I recommend picking up a healer quite early in the game and getting a good single target damage dealer.
A shop can be found in the major cities/villages where you can buy and sell items and ingredients you need or want to get rid of. If you don’t want to sell your precious items you can put them in a stash that can also be accessed in the major cities.
Speaking of ingredients: There is a crafting system in the game that you can use to make special weapons and enchant them.
Beat the Virtual out of Reality – Grind
If you’re playing on Steam there are 33 achievements to get. I would say 32 of them are doable in a normal play-through.
One of them being the “Beat the Virtual out of Reality” achievement requires a lot of grind and cost me around 5 hours to do after I completed the game story wise. You basically need to complete the whole Bestiary which is a ingame book that tells you weaknesses and other traits of monsters. To complete it you need to kill 30 of each monster which is easy on lower level but annoying once you get to higher level monster.
The other problem is that you need some expansions to get all achievements. The only game expansion you are able to buy on steam is “Here be dragons” for around 5€. I was able to purchase the other 2 expansions with ingame currency. So I recommend checking the “Magazine” button in the top left corner first to see if you’re able to get the “Here be dragons” expansion for ingame money.
Conclusion
| Summarized Review | ||
|---|---|---|
| Player: Nik, Playtime: 21h, Score out of 100: 82 | ||
| criteria | X/10 | comment |
| Graphics | 8 | I like detailed pixel art |
| Audio | 6 | |
| Hardware | 10 | |
| Gameplay | 8 | sometimes repetitive |
| Story | 9 | quite cool although I skipped some dialogue |
| Difficulty | 8 | easy after reading some guides |
| Grind | 9 | only if you want to |
| Audience | 5 | aimed only at rpg fan |
| Bugs/ Support |
10 | haven’t seen any so far |
| Price | 9 | cheap |
| Extra comment | ||
Knights of Pen and Paper 2: The game is perfect if you want to experience some oldschool rpg vibes. There are no bugs I've seen so far and the story is interesting. Gameplay-wise it can get a bit repetitive but it worth the price. We recommend buying the "Knights of Pen and Paper 2 – Deluxiest Edition" when its on sale for around 4€. This includes the "Here be dragons" DLC and is cheaper than buying them separately. If you want to try the gameplay before buying it try the mobile version of the game as its quite similar and free. – GLPC: emk
If you like pixel style game check out our review about Minecraft.
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