You ever just play a game basically for no reason besides you see one review of it and you are mildly interested and you find out it's only, like, 1 hour long?
No?
Well, thanks MegaTheRealOne anyway for the inspiration.

This is one of the most 3/5 star games I've ever played. To me, a 3/5 game is something that "has potential and some good parts, but fairly significant flaws that I believe harm the experience." Yeah, that perfectly describes Clockwork Knight for me.
The gameplay is very simple. Walk (or run, I didn't find this out until maybe halfway through the second world) around, jump, and kill enemies with your key sword thing (wow that's familiar), which you can do buy stabbing or spinning it. In some levels you can find an invincibility power up, and you can collect gears for your healthbar (I think it goes up to 5 gears but I'm not completely sure). You can also pick up items like footballs to throw at enemies. Simple idea, pretty good execution. The controls are..............FINE. It's not amazing to control, but once you get the hang of it, you can have a pretty good time with it. The bosses are pretty worthless. Dumb simple attack patterns, pretty easy as well. The final boss (both phases) was great, though. Using the item throwing feature was really fun, honestly.
The graphics are pretty meh, if I'm being honest. All the charcters in the game are toys, so it makes sense that the artstyle would look off, but most of the game is unappealing to look at in general. The graphics remind me of Super Mario Kart 64, where the characters are prerendered sprites, but the environments are 3D. It worked pretty well there, but it just doesn't look too good here. The cutscenes are also in 3D and...ooh, they're rough, but they're not horrible. I can see them looking fairly good on an old CRT.
The music, honestly, the music was great. It ranges from energetic, fun jazz music to more laidback stuff to whatever that train level music was with the harmonica. My favorite song was probably the second Boss theme. It had a more latin feeling and it really made the bosses more exciting for me, even if the bosses the song was played for didn't really fit (two robots lmaoo). But overall, this is a solid soundtrack. I really like how they went for something new by basically doing a fully jazz soundtrack. You could see it as a precursor to Cuphead, almost, in that regard.
The game is incredibly short. About the length of Super Mario Land in terms of levels, which is insane, but it's true. There are four "worlds", which are just rooms in the house, which are Betsy and Kevin's rooms, the Kitchen (eugh ice physics), and the Attic. Each "world" or room has three levels, and even that's a stretch, seeing how the final level in each world is just a boss fight. Because of the length, there are no checkpoints in the levels. A little annoying, but I digress.
All in all, it's got a fair bit of charm for a little 2D platformer. I could've seen this series getting pretty big and becoming a Sega mainstay, but seeing as I had never heard of it before yesterday, it's fair to say that did not happen. Might have to play the sequel, Clockwork Knight 2...