Spirits & Spells
Just in case you haven’t had your USDA recommended daily allowance of crap.
Tags: Spirits & Spells Categories: Game Cube Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Larry McCormick on Mar 7th, 2004
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Spirits & Spells (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
You may think life as a game reviewer is pretty sweet. Hey sometimes it is. Other times you wish you could wrap the controller cord around your neck and invite sweet, sweet death rather than endure another five minutes of whatever half-assed game you’ve got to play. I didn’t quite experience those suicidal tendencies while playing uber-me-too platformer Spirits and Spells, but it brought me closer than any game in a while. What makes it so craptacular? I’m glad you asked. Well, maybe you didn’t ask, but that doesn’t really matter now does it?
The gameplay is standard platform fare. You can switch between Greg, dressed up as a devil and Alicia, dressed up as a witch, on the fly provided you have earned a switch by collecting a set number of gems. Enemies can be attacked with either of the children’s weapons or by jumping on their heads. The collision detection is so terrible that killing or avoiding enemies is often a crapshoot though… if you really must play this game I suggest using Alicia whenever possible as her hat-toss attack is much longer range than Greg’s stabbing pitchfork attack. There are also special puzzle objects that can only be activated by Greg or Alicia.
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The levels themselves only have three or four different location types. You’ve got mountains and villages with snow, haunted houses, caves and a factory-like mad scientist mansion. Not only do you have a limited number of location types, the developers have even gone the extra half-assed mile by REPEATING entire sections of previous levels in later ones. Not since the 8-bit days have I borne witness to such utter laziness.
The story, if you can call it that, is told through still pictures with voice-overs. That’s right, there’s not even video or cut-scenes that use the game’s own graphic engine. You might argue that the developers wanted to present the game in a storybook fashion. I might reply, “thats BS and that the alternatives take time to create and cost money.” It’s clear that the publisher and/or developers wanted to shovel this one out of the stable as soon as possible.
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This game is also choc full o’ bugs. Aside from the collision detection problems, sometimes the puzzle objects I mentioned earlier don’t show up when they’re supposed to. During one boss fight towards the end of the game that requires switching characters and hitting their puzzle objects… the puzzle objects, necessary to complete the battle, just weren’t there.
In another level, there’s a section with a lava pool that requires tapping one of the aforementioned puzzle objects to make platforms sprout out of the lava creating a path that you can walk on. The first time I played the level I couldn’t figure out what to do next because the puzzle object just wasn’t there… it wasn’t there when I respawned after losing a life either. At first I thought the game had collapsed my mental faculties to those of a slow three-year-old and that I just didn’t understand what to do next. That theory was shot down after I restarted the level from my last save to see if I’d missed some key item or something and sure enough the next time I reached that point, it was just there. But why should our games work right? I mean that just let’s you finish them faster while at the same time pissing you off a lot less!
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Spirits and Spells sure ain’t pretty, either. The framerate is shakier than an Eskimo without an igloo, sinking to early N64 standards. There are a few lighting effects here and there along with some shadow play, but that’s as complicated as it gets. Speaking of the shadows, even they frequently get totally screwed up or don’t appear at all making jumps very difficult. Even with the shadows, the forced, often-strange camera angles don’t help matters, either. Oh and you can’t adjust the camera manually, so if you can’t see something, you can’t see something.
I can say this about Spirits and Spells: the character design of the protagonists and some NPC allies is fairly charming in a Tim Burton meets the Cabbage Patch Kids sort of way. The main characters Greg and Alicia are sickeningly cute. But if you consider that a positive be warned that the rest of this game falls way short of the “I can stomach this” mark. You’ll spend most of the game dispatching of avoiding three or four basic enemies. The later levels introduce about three more. Your foes are blocky constructs that look like they’d be more at home on the PlayStation or N64 than the GameCube.
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The only other thing Spirits and Spells has going for it is a well composed orchestral soundtrack that is suitable for a much better game. Despite its high quality, however, for the first three-quarters of the game, pretty much the same three songs loop over and over.
Being the kind, merciful soul that I am, I’ll end the review here even though Spirits and Spells has plenty of other deficiencies to note. Spirits and Spells is only recommended to people who a) are too young to be able to read this review and b) have a desire to own bad games in order to laugh at them. Other than that, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Pretty good music + It ends |
3.5 |
| What Doesn't | |
| - Everything else | |
| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Spirits and Spells is the worst game I've played in a long time and that's saying a lot. When a game recycles entire portions of levels you've completed into later levels you just know something is terribly amiss. Only for the morbidly curious. | |
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Tags: Spirits & Spells
Posted by Larry McCormick on Mar 7th, 2004 and is filed under Game Cube Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
