Knuckle Jet Review

A Rocket-Powered Fist Instead of a Pair of Legs

Knuckle Jet throws out the standard action-platformer toolkit of running and jumping and replaces it almost entirely with a single rocket-fueled gauntlet. Punching sends the protagonist, Anastasia, rocketing in whatever direction she's aimed, and ricocheting off walls and floors at sharp, pinball-like angles keeps her airborne indefinitely if the player can chain the bounces together. The result, several reviewers note, feels closer to flying than jumping: momentum and precision matter far more than platforming fundamentals, and levels are built to be blasted through in looping, high-speed arcs rather than walked. Developed and published by Rain Games, the Norwegian studio behind the Teslagrad series, Knuckle Jet shares that earlier series' steampunk-adjacent world and clockwork-industrial visual language, filtered here through a distinctive stop-motion, claymation-inspired art style. The game launched on Steam on September 15, 2026 for Windows and Linux, priced at $14.99, following a public demo released in May 2026 and an initial reveal that dates back to March 2025.

The setup casts Anastasia against Tychoon, a power-hungry industrialist who has kidnapped an entire orphanage and put the children to work amid his clockwork cities and soot-black forests; freeing them means punching through roughly 75 levels spread across five distinct biomes, collecting gear upgrades along the way, with local co-op available for players who want to smash through the story alongside a friend.

A Small, Very Positive Chinese-Led Launch

Knuckle Jet has drawn 35 reviews in its first few days, with 34 positive and just 1 negative for a 97% "Positive" rating on Steam. The overwhelming majority of that review pool is written in Simplified Chinese, with several reviewers explicitly crediting a Chinese content creator's coverage of the game for bringing it to their attention, and multiple reviews specifically praising the game's Chinese localization as thorough and natural rather than the perfunctory, obviously machine-translated text common to smaller indie releases.

A Genuinely Novel Flight Mechanic Wrapped in Claymation Art

Reviewers consistently single out the core "punch to fly" mechanic as the game's biggest strength. One detailed Chinese-language review compares the overall feel to a lower-difficulty Celeste, noting the wall-ricochet mechanic in particular, while praising the game's distinctive visual style, its driving soundtrack, and its satisfying sense of impact on every hit. That same reviewer highlights generous exploration rewards, with at least three collectibles hidden in nearly every level, and estimates that full completion across all 75 levels could reasonably run twenty to thirty hours or more. An English-language reviewer who playtested the game ahead of release calls it a truly excellent action platformer, praising its stable frame pacing, fully rebindable controls, and level design that rewards searching every level for hidden bonuses without ever feeling like a chore, while noting it isn't a metroidvania so much as a speed-focused, part-collectathon action title. Another reviewer compares the flight feel to the classic weapon physics of Worms, describing the moment-to-moment loop as favoring high-speed aerial control, precise angling, and momentum management over traditional jump-based platforming, and calls the soundtrack and sense of environmental destruction genuinely stress-relieving. Several reviewers highlight small touches, like character portraits that visibly sway in response to controller stick input during dialogue, and praise the equipment system for letting players unlock useful mobility upgrades, like an early double-jump, without artificially gating exploration behind mandatory story progress the way many genre peers do.

Twitchy Controller Aiming, an Unpolished UI, and a Front-Loaded Weak Start

The pool's lone negative review is also its most detailed piece of criticism, and it's echoed in smaller complaints scattered across several of the positive reviews. That negative reviewer argues the stop-motion art style isn't fully realized, saying the character silhouettes read as claymation but the materials and lighting don't sell the effect, leaving the frame-stepped animation looking merely awkward rather than intentional. The same review is harsher on controls, specifically criticizing analog-stick aiming for the jet-punch flight direction as unreliable on a controller, with the character frequently flying somewhere other than where they aimed and dying to unforced "flight accidents" as a result; several positive Chinese-language reviews independently echo this same complaint, suggesting flight-direction aiming needs practice or is simply more comfortable on keyboard. That reviewer also flags the gear upgrade system for allowing irreversible mistakes, since materials spent leveling one piece of equipment can't be refunded or redirected once committed, and calls the UI essentially undesigned in its current state, a complaint at least one other, more positive reviewer separately agrees with, suggesting a future UI pass. On story, multiple reviewers describe the orphan-rescue plot as thin and easily skippable, delivered mostly through static dialogue portraits rather than real cutscenes; one otherwise very positive review suggests the game front-loads its weakest content, arguing the opening levels feel comparatively boring next to what comes later and recommending the developers move their best ideas earlier to hook new players faster. A few reviewers also note that certain unlocked equipment can trivialize later challenges and that boss fights in particular are seen as noticeably easy relative to the standard platforming content.

Verdict

Knuckle Jet takes a genre that's usually built around jumping and rebuilds it around a rocket-punch flight mechanic that reviewers describe as immediately distinctive and, once mastered, genuinely thrilling to chain together across its 75 levels. Its 97% approval rating from an early, heavily Chinese-language audience reflects real enthusiasm for that core loop, for its claymation-inspired steampunk art direction, for a soundtrack multiple reviewers single out by name, and for a Chinese localization effort reviewers repeatedly call unusually thorough for a Western indie release. The rough edges are concrete rather than vague: analog-stick flight aiming that multiple reviewers, not just the one negative review, describe as imprecise and occasionally frustrating; an unfinished-feeling UI; an equipment system that punishes experimentation with irreversible upgrade choices; and an opening stretch of levels several reviewers say undersells what the rest of the game delivers. At $14.99 for a reported twenty-plus hours of content if pursuing full completion, Knuckle Jet is a strong pickup for action-platformer fans drawn to its unusual momentum-based flight and its striking visual identity, provided they're willing to push past a shaky first impression and, ideally, play with a keyboard rather than a controller.