Postknight review
:: RETURN TO SENDERPrice: Free
Version: 1.0.10
App Reviewed on: iPhone 5
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Postknight is a free-to-play action role-playing game (rpg) that makes a heck of a first impression. It's got some really adorable art, a neat idea for a gameplay loop, and virtually no load times. You'd think that a package with these slick trappings would make for a game that's easy to lose yourself in for hours. Unfortunately though, Postknight feels like a shiny box with very little inside rather than a complete package.
Chain mail
In Postknight, you play as a knight that delivers mail across the land. To perform this task, you need to be a skilled enough knight to fight off all sorts of fantasy creatures that might prevent you from reaching your destination. On a gameplay level, this involves selecting missions to deliver items, which activates a real time battle sequence where you need to manage some abilities on cooldown timers to make sure you take out your foes without losing all your health.
As you advance in the game, you'll engage in a lot of familiar rpg systems, like leveling up, getting new loot, opening up new areas, and more. You'll also get the opportunity to earn badges to increase your Postknight rank, which helps you gain gold and experience faster.
First class envelope
Although a lot of the gameplay in Postknight is pretty standard, the game gets a lot of points for its presentation. Its cartoony aesthetic is bright and charming, its menu systems are really easy to navigate, and your character actually changes his appearance based on new loot you equip to him.
On top of this, Postknight has virtually no load times in it besides its initial boot sequence. Jumping into and out of missions is lightning quick, which makes it tempting to just keep pushing through the game.
Paper thin
As much as I like a lot of Postknight's aesthetic design, I wish there was a little more beneath the surface of the game. The real-time combat of Postknight is very simple, and there's not a whole lot of stuff to do in the game besides a lot of combat. The game does allow for a certain amount of customization through gear and skill points, but all of these things don't create any meaningful changes in the combat.
It's also worth noting that Postknight is a free-to-play game. Its main gating mechanic comes in the form of your character's life bar, which takes time to heal back up to full between missions. You can choose to take on missions with some of your health missing, but that's obviously a risk that might make you have to wait longer to regain more health. It's an interesting system, and one that's not particularly exploitative, but it does occasionally stop you from playing, which is annoying for a game that is so good otherwise about getting you from mission to mission quickly.
The bottom line
Postknight got its claws into me when I first started playing it, but the more time I spent with it, the more I realized how rote the moment to moment action is. When that happened, I realized that I really like the world of Postknight and looking at stuff in it, but I don't really like playing it.