Knights and Bikes Review: Two Girls, One Island, and the Co-op That Carries It

Knights and Bikes is a co-op action adventure game set on an island, and it wants you to ride a bike with a friend. Foam Sword, a British indie studio made up of former Media Molecule staff, built it around two heroines: Nessa and Demelza. Nessa is an orphan from the mainland who ran away to the island looking for her past and her identity. Demelza is an islander obsessed with video games, hunting the truth with clues from her favorite one. The game is out on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, Mac and Linux. It scores 7.8 out of 10.

Trailer, via Double Fine.

Nessa and Demelza

The pair is the whole point. Knights and Bikes is built for two players, and its single-player and multiplayer modes both work, but the co-operative mode is where the design sits. You are not escorting a companion or babysitting an AI. You are both on the same island, both on bikes, both chasing the same thing from different directions.

That split is the smartest thing in the game. Nessa wants her past. Demelza wants the truth, and she wants it through the lens of the game she already loves. Foam Sword gives each girl a reason to be here that the other cannot fully supply. It keeps the adventure from becoming a fetch errand with a nice coat of paint.

Goonies and Secret of Mana

Knights and Bikes wears its influences plainly. It is inspired by The Goonies and Secret of Mana, and that pairing tells you most of what you need to know before you press start. The Goonies gives it the kids-on-an-island structure, the sense that the adults have missed something and the children have not. Secret of Mana gives it the co-operative action framework, the idea that the second player is a full participant rather than a guest.

The hand-drawn 3D world is the other inheritance. It is not a realistic island. It is a drawn one, and the art style does real work: it makes the place feel like something remembered rather than something mapped.

What the Island Asks of You

The game is a puzzle adventure at heart, played from a bird’s-eye isometric perspective. You explore, you solve, you fight, and you do it with a second person beside you. The genre tags are puzzle, adventure and indie, with action and kids as themes. That last theme matters. This is a game about children, made for people who remember being one, and it does not pretend otherwise.

The mechanics are not the draw. The relationship is.

Where It Sits

A 7.8 is a fair score, and the critic aggregate across eight outlets lands in the same place for the same reason. Knights and Bikes is not a landmark co-op game. It does not reinvent the genre it borrows from, and it does not try to.

Here is the ranking of what actually carries it:

1. The two heroines and the split between them.
2. The hand-drawn world.
3. The co-operative structure.
4. The puzzle and combat systems.

That order is deliberate. The top two are why you finish it. The bottom two are what you tolerate to get there.

The Case for Two Players

Play it alone and Knights and Bikes is a pleasant, slightly thin adventure. Play it with someone and it becomes something else. The co-op mode is not a bonus feature bolted on after the campaign was designed. It is the campaign.

That is also the game’s limit. It has one strong idea, executed well, and it does not have a second one behind it.

7.8 of 10

Knights and Bikes is worth your time if you have someone to play it with. Foam Sword built a small, specific, hand-drawn thing about two girls on an island, and it works because the girls work. The influences are visible but not slavish. The co-op is the reason to show up.

co-op games · Foam Sword · game review · Indie Games · Knights and Bikes · Nintendo Switch