An Intricate Action-Platformer Where The Enemy Is Often The Engine
Developer Andrea Cavuoto has their sights set on the gaming industry. In S.P.E.A.R., the devs of a video game have had their budget slashed and there’s no time for proper QA (that’ll resonate for anyone who’s bought a AAA title over the past few years, or helped to make one). The resulting negligence means that the game’s hero pops out of existence. His spear – tip replaced with a game cursor – is picked up by an NPC called ‘Default’.
Default is now the game’s hero. Default’s quest is to rid the world of fifteen bugs (those are rookie numbers). These bugs are causing glitches and disappearances around a medieval game world. If you, playing as Default, don’t stop them, there’s a very good chance that the game gets canned. And then everyone’s a goner.
Spears Coming Out Of Your Ears
On the face of it, S.P.E.A.R. is a conventional action-platformer. It’s chopped up into discrete levels, and you play one after the other. At the end of each level is a tear in un-reality, and a bug emerges for you to slay (think the Matrix sentinels). Each level has three collectibles in the form of floating code, while glowing balls of stuff can be collected and spent on cosmetics for your character.
So far, so meh. But S.P.E.A.R. loves to tinker with this formula in a variety of ways. After each level, you’re dumped into an explorable 3D game map (the New Super Mario World games do something similar). You can find secrets, glowy-balls and hidden levels in this expanse, and many of them can only be unlocked if you’ve done a decent enough job of hoarding collectibles. Just when you think that you have a handle on S.P.E.A.R., in comes an optional level that hoicks up the difficulty and plays like a hardcore challenge room.
The levels themselves are complex propositions too. There are often multiple paths to the exit, to the point that we wondered whether we were on a critical path or spin-off. At the end of these optional paths are quests and quest-items that turn S.P.E.A.R. into a quasi-RPG. You might find rumours of treasure in another level, or a key that someone else wants in a far-off mine. It’s perfectly possible to exit a level and head back to another so you can hand someone a banana.
A Pointer Or Two
I was all over this expansion on a simple formula. Secret rooms didn’t just pump out treasure: they were steps to another treasure room and another. It made S.P.E.A.R.’s world that much denser, and more rewarding to boot. Finding offshoots was worthwhile, as you could net an item that makes you permanently pixelated or drunk.
S.P.E.A.R. has a structure to die for, then. But you might be wondering what it’s like to play. And that’s something of a mixed bag.
A Double-Edged Spear
S.P.E.A.R. certainly gets mileage out of the ol’ spear. Initially, it’s used to jab into enemies and thrust into switches. But as the levels progress, the spear gets upgraded to become a helicopter-like float, a means to reach higher platforms, and a projectile where you have control over its entire trajectory. You can loop it over walls and onto switches for a Big Break trickshot.
Default’s pretty nimble, too. He can double jump, although the second jump is oddly stumpy. It barely lifts higher than the initial jump, and – even by the end – we didn’t quite get a handle on it. But he can also wall-jump, run, crouch and leg it through portals.
We have no issue with the moveset. It’s a long list of varied tools. There’s a lovely cadence of unlocking them, which means that – on average – every level has a new thing to master. One level is thick with portals, which means you need to be an accurate spearchucker so that you can fire through them. Another is loaded with updrafts, so the floating is more of a thing.
S.P.E.A.R. is also very good at straddling the line between difficult and achievable. We died hundreds of times, but we never quite felt like we wanted to give up. That’s quite the achievement, and it’s possible thanks to generous checkpointing and a complete understanding of what was required of me.
Stabbed In The Ribs
But that doesn’t mean that I was consistently enjoying myself. A lot of the time I was seething or in pain. And that’s down to some imprecise controls and a reliance on a physics engine that didn’t always want to play fair.
I think the best way to describe the problem is that you could attempt the same thing a thousand times – a spear throw at a bug boss, a wall-jump, a float onto a platform – and a hundred different things could happen. The platform might bob around and then toss you into an abyss. The wall-jump might not register one or two inputs. The spear-throw might arc on a different trajectory for some made-up reason.
S.P.E.A.R.’s world isn’t locked in place like Mario or Sonic’s worlds are. It floats, moves and spins. It’s bold to employ physics in this kind of game, particularly when there are moments where precision and accuracy are so, so important. But I can’t help feeling the decision is a net-negative for the game. It leads to too much unpredictability, and that can wallop you in the face when you least want it to. In the latter levels, when enemies are chasing you, or mad sequences of portals need to be jumped in, it can be overwhelming.
It combos so poorly with the imprecision of some controls. I was forever throwing spears, expecting them to arc exactly as the dotted line suggested they might. But they’d do something entirely different. The double-jump would fail to trigger, or be so paltry that it wasn’t worth triggering at all. Hovers and wall-jumps would trigger on a coin-flip.
High Ambition on a Low Budget
The result is a game that bites off more than it can chew. This is, after all, a low-budget game with a single developer. But it’s an action-platformer-RPG that has a punt at full world physics and more special moves than half the cast of Smash Bros.
We love S.P.E.A.R. for that ambition. It wouldn’t be half as interesting or surprising without it. We just wished that, like the game in its story, it had a little more time and money to achieve its vision. Because when S.P.E.A.R. gets even remotely difficult, it can feel like you’re not just fighting giant, flying eye bosses: you’re fighting the engine, too.
Important Links
Crashing Onto Xbox Series X|S – S.P.E.A.R. Is A Glitch-Filled Platforming Adventure – https://www.thexboxhub.com/crashing-onto-xbox-series-xs-s-p-e-a-r-is-a-glitch-filled-platforming-adventure/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/spear/9nzjzxjz0n3c
