Portal Knights

A colourful, approachable voxel RPG

Portal Knights' pitch is direct: "join this cooperative, 3D sandbox action RPG to level up your character, craft epic weapons, conquer enemies in real-time, and build almost anything. Craft your adventure. Forge your hero." The official screenshot shows the tone well — three brightly-costumed characters, including a bee-costumed player avatar, wading through a flower-and-mushroom-strewn field toward a half-built stone fortress, with a floating chunk of terrain drifting in the sky behind them. That floating-island structure is the game's clearest distinguishing idea relative to genre giants like Minecraft and Terraria: rather than one continuous world, the game is built from a chain of smaller, self-contained islands connected by portals, each meant to offer a fresh biome and challenge set. Reviewers consistently credit the presentation and the basic RPG-building fusion as genuinely appealing, particularly for newer or younger players looking for a gentler entry point into the survival-crafting genre than its more demanding peers offer.

A recurring argument that the content doesn't keep pace

Set against that accessible charm is a remarkably consistent complaint that's followed the game since its earliest post-launch reviews. "I've been playing this game since Early Access, and back then it showed promise... Now it's very disappointing," reads a 2017 review, going on to describe combat as "dull, boring and repetitive, you would just spam attack and dodge and that's about it." A separate 2017 review makes the structural point directly: "This game can't decide whether it wants to be a survival crafting game or an adventure RPG game, and ends up doing neither well," describing base- building and crafting stations as functionally at odds with the more linear adventure progression the game also wants to offer. A 2018 review breaks its assessment down plainly: "repetitive worlds - repetitive enemies - repetitive quests," even while crediting "pretty graphics" and four-player co-op as genuine strengths. This pattern isn't confined to launch-era disappointment either — a 2025 review describes being recommended the game as "Minecraft with a goal" and finding that framing didn't hold up: "the game works fine, but it's just not fun for me," rating it a middling 6 out of 10 specifically on the grounds of thin long-term engagement. The specificity and consistency of this complaint across nearly a decade suggests a real, structural content-pacing issue rather than a matter of a few players simply wanting more from a naturally modest game.

Two more specific, practical complaints

Beyond the broader content-depth debate, two narrower issues are worth flagging on their own. A 2017 review focused specifically on multiplayer describes the connection system as unreliable when trying to join a friend's session, a real practical barrier for a game whose co-op is one of its main selling points. Separately, a February 2026 review raises a specific and verifiable design flaw around DLC integration: "It's a nice game, but I don't like looting stuff I can't use because I don't own the DLC," describing enemies dropping items tied to optional paid content that a base-game owner can see but not use. That's a concrete monetisation friction point distinct from the broader repetition complaint, and one a prospective buyer should factor in separately when deciding whether to buy the base game alone or budget for the DLC packs up front.

A fairer comparison than "Minecraft with a goal"

It's worth pushing back gently on the framing at least one reviewer describes being sold on, since holding Portal Knights to a direct Minecraft comparison sets up a mismatch the game was probably never going to survive. Minecraft's entire design philosophy is built around near-total systemic freedom and emergent possibility over years of play; Portal Knights is a much smaller, more curated experience explicitly structured around discrete islands, quest chains and RPG progression rather than open-ended systemic depth. Judged against that more modest, more structured ambition — closer to a light action RPG with a building layer bolted on than a sandbox with an RPG bolted on — the repetition complaints land somewhat differently. A handful of islands and enemy types is a real limitation for a hundred-hour sandbox game; it's a less damning one for a shorter, session-based co-op title that was probably never trying to be Minecraft in the first place, regardless of what recommendation or marketing led some players to expect that comparison.

What the class system actually offers

It's worth being specific about what RPG structure the game does provide, since the repetition complaints focus mostly on world and enemy variety rather than the character-building layer itself. Players choose between warrior, ranger and mage archetypes, each with distinct combat styles, skill trees and preferred equipment types, giving even a single playthrough some build-level variety independent of the environment around it. Reviewers who focus specifically on this system, rather than the broader world content, tend to rate it more favourably — the complaint in this review's research is almost never about class balance or combat responsiveness in isolation, but about how few new situations that combat gets applied to as a playthrough continues. That's a meaningfully narrower problem than "the whole game is shallow," and worth keeping distinct when deciding whether the game's actual weak point matters to a given buyer's priorities.

Final verdict

Portal Knights succeeds at what it visibly sets out to be: an approachable, colourful, easy-to-pick- up voxel RPG well suited to short co-op sessions, and its Very Positive rating reflects genuine, broad appeal on those terms. Where this review's score lands more cautiously is in taking seriously a consistent, decade-spanning argument that the game's content doesn't expand to match its early promise — repetitive worlds, enemies and quests recurring across a run in a way multiple reviewers independently describe using nearly identical language, from 2017 through 2026. That's a fair trade for players who want a light, casual voxel RPG rather than a genre-defining sandbox, and a reasonable reason for players expecting Minecraft- or Terraria-level long-term depth to look elsewhere.