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Shovel Knight: King of Cards delayed to back half of 2019

An April release is not in the cards for Shovel Knight: King of Cards and Shovel Knight Showdown, which will now release in the latter half of 2019.

Ozzie Mejia

February 18, 2019 5:00 PM

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Believe it or not, the full Shovel Knight package is still not yet complete. Yacht Club Games released its retro throwback platformer several years ago, but continues to work on new, free content in the form of new campaigns. There's still one left to go, but it looks to be taking the longest of them all, with Yacht Club announcing on Monday that King of Cards and Shovel Knight Showdown are going to undergo one last significant delay.

"We have only a bit more work left to do on completing King of Cards and Showdown," reads the announcement on the Yacht Club Games website. "It remains our focus to bring these to the highest level of quality just as we have with previous Shovel Knight games. It’s also our priority to have these games on the disc/card for the upcoming physical version. We need a little more time to make this happen, and so we are pushing the release back one last time. We’re still aiming to release everything at once, so this this delay applies to everything: physical editions, digital update, and Treasure Trove amiibo 3-pack."

Yacht Club notes that this delay will take everything out of its previously-projected April 9 release and push it back several months, which will result in everything arriving in the latter half of 2019. The developer notes that it is taking a few different paths with these releases than anything that's been included in Shovel Knight before. King of Cards will be the most different of the Shovel Knight campaigns, featuring 30 levels, albeit shorter than the average Shovel Knight stage.

Meanwhile, Showdown will go in a completely different direction, pitting players against one another in multiplayer combat, more akin to a fighting game. There will be several different game modes, giving players multiple options to help dispose of one another. However, Showdown will also have story content for each of the game's characters, further fleshing out the Shovel Knight lore.

The delay also extends to the Shovel Knight: Treaure Trove amiibo three-pack. Those hoping to pick up figures for Plague Knight, Specter Knight, and King Knight will have to wait just a little bit longer. King of Cards, Shovel Knight Showdown, and the amiibo three-pack are all being held off for a single release date, which has yet to be finalized. They'll all hit every available Shovel Knight platform (yes, even the Wii U) on the same day digitally, with a giant physical edition collecting everything also set to release on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?