Spiral Knights is a cooperative adventure in a persistent world with a focus on instant, fast-paced action. Arm yourself and join the ranks of the Spiral Knights; stranded on an alien world, they must explore the ever-changing Clockworks beneath its surface in hopes of reaching its mysterious Core.

Spiral Knights has been in development since around 2007.The game was released to advance testers on November 12, 2009 and to the general public on April 4, 2011. The game was released through the Steam software distribution system on June 14, 2011. It was also made available through gaming web sites such as Kongregate and Armor Games.

Critical response to Spiral Knights was positive. Ars Technica's Andrew Webster wrote, "The quality of free-to-play games continues to rise, and Spiral Knights is proof of this. It's fun, addictive..." Tony Sims wrote for Wired, "It is very fun and addictive, however hardcore gamers might find it too old-school."

The game was nominated for the 2011 Game Developers Choice Online Awards in four categories: Best Visual Online Arts, Best Online Game Design, Best Audio for an Online Game, and Best New Online Game. It won the award for Best Online Game Design.

For the first two years of the game's general availability, playing time was restricted by the in-game commodity of energy. Tom Senior of PC Gamer wrote, "When an energy drought stops play halfway through a session with friends, it’s like being poked in the eye." However, the energy system was redesigned in the July 30, 2013 game update, and this criticism no longer applies.

Nick Popovich was the lead designer of Spiral Knights for all of its early development.On January 16, 2014, Popovich resigned his position at Three Rings, leaving the continuing development of the game to the rest of the Spiral Knights team.

As many of you know, Steam has been doing a campaign to bring free to play MMOs onto its roster. One of the ones that got added and is booming now in popularity is Spiral Knights. I am ashamed to say I actually never heard of this game before the move to steam, since when it got moved there I got tweets from other writers talking about it and invites from my friends on steam. The game itself however is also brought by Three Rings Games, which I am a fan of due to their game Puzzle Pirates. The game is also brought by SEGA, which well, everyone knows. Since the game itself is booming with popularity now, and we don't have it in MMOsite's database yet, I wanted to give this game a look and see if it is worth all of the buzz about it.

Character creation in the game is fairly simple, which seems to be the premise of the game. There are no classes, as everyone in the game is dubbed a knight. So when brought to the creation you are offered the ability to change your helmet, your armor, (Spiral Knights Gold)the design of the armor, and your personal color. Also before any of you get confused the armor and helm selections are for looks, not different bonuses or anything like that, the later selections are based more off of stats and things of that nature. The helmet and armor only have about three choices each, which are fairly limited, but it is forgiven, and I will tell you why later. The design basically is more like a first color while the personal color is a second color, meaning you can choose two different color sets for your tiny knight, but the personal color will give you a lot more options. I am not sure why they didn't just set multiple color templates for you to truly choose on your own, but to each their own I guess. I was able to find a color mix that fit me quite well though, so I wasn't totally disappointed.