Discover the secrets of the Clockworks, here.
When you start the game, you are introduced to the game's lore and the world of Cradle. The story is based around your landing on an alien world full of ancient technologies that your race wants to investigate. In order to do so you must complete the "arcade" missions to drill down to the clockworks' core (clockworks being the ancient technology buried within the planet). Each mission has a different atmosphere, but is virtually the same in gameplay. The more you play the more missions are unlocked.
When you first launch Spiral Knights, you can customize your avatar. You can change its helmet, body armor, details, and color. This is where you get to name your character. Each new word in the name is capitalized so be prepared to see a lot of capitalized Of's or A's. There is also a guild function within the game, so you can join or create one. It unfortunately has no real customizEach elevator has its missions based around a tiered system, so certain levels are not available to you at the beginning. In order for you to accomplish unlocking more levels you must bring a crystal found in various levels to the elevator. The Levels themselves can have an atmosphere of anything from a destroyed factory, fiery volcano, forest, battle arena, or haunted graveyard. Still, each mission is nothing more than a case of 'kill everything that moves'. If you're lucky, you might also manage to unlock a bonus level where you can collect coins without enemies to bother you.
For the missions you can have a party of up to four players. The more players there are, the easier things become, as enemy numbers never change. Enemy variety is highly limited and fall into using natural elements, bombs, or their fists to hit you. Things do get boring incredibly fast due the old fashioned gameplay mechanic of "walk into area, monsters randomly appear" that all hack and slash games use.
able functionality past the name.
The gameplay itself is that of a vastly crippled hack and slash. You are basically playing God of War with cutesy avatars and limited abilities. Your abilities are pretty much slashing your sword, gun, blocking, and a bomb you purchased or picked up. Weapons level up and get stronger, but they gain no additional abilities beyond attack speed and damage.
Movement controls are centered around the good old-fashioned mouse and keyboard. To move your avatar you can either click and hold the left mouse button or use the W, A, S, D keys. Attack control is the right mouse button and Z, and shield control is X. Remembering to use the shield control will save your life at certain points in the game, so you cannot afford to ignore the keyboard controls
The arcade is a part of the city of Haven, which is the social arena of the game. Haven offers a basic marketplace that is full of other players. You get to socialize with the game community on that server. There are some markets where you can purchase new weapons and armors to help you on your adventures through the arcade's missions. Prices range from dirt-cheap for those starting off to the insanely expensive. Saving your coins is a wise decision; the basic weapons really are not effective. Just like all free-to-play MOGs, there is an in-game currency called crystal energy that is purchasable using a credit card. This allows for conversion to more coins or unlocking more item slots for a month's time to give yourself an easier time beating missions.
Visually, Spiral Knights is greatly outdated in graphics compared to many web-based titles available today. The decision to make the game child-friendly is fine, but the game is not as clean looking as it should be. Just adding 2xAA and brightening up the colors would probably solve many graphical issues. The audio is also lacking. It is like classic Castlevania and other titles mixed into one, but the music cuts out and stops after a while.
Overall Spiral Knights really is not a pleasant game. It is great for kids starting off as early gamers, but even they will migrate to RuneScape or one of the many other MOGs pretty quickly - it's just too dull. There is nothing really fun or exciting enough about it to keep you wanting to play for more than a day or two. In the end, I would say skip this and find another game that will hold your attention, like Mount and Blade or RuneScape.
http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/review/51238/spiral-knights/