There is something about sitting down and watching cartoons early Saturday mornings when you are 10 years old. Maybe it is the colorful commercials or the ridiculous plotlines that require no mind power to process, but it is just as big a part of childhood as the sugary cereal advertised as part of a nutritious breakfast. Once you are in college, though, watching the cartoons bright and early on a Saturday does not hold such appeal. The new Wii game “Spyborgs” unfortunately has the same issue.
Playing “Spyborgs,” developed by Hollywood-based Bionic Games, feels like watching a cartoon. Its graphics are intricately and artfully pieced together, but the game’s plotline is severely lacking. The game begins with an extremely short cut scene that fails to convey anything other than the fact that there is trouble, and then you are plunged into a bombardment of enemy bots.
Before the combat begins, you are given the choice between three characters, and you pick one for yourself and one for the computer. During combat, it is hard to feel like you are doing even a quarter of the work that your computerized friend is doing, regardless of what difficulty level you have set for yourself. Aside from the missing writing, the game also lacks variety in action. Every combat sequence seems to be frantically hitting the punch/kick/action button as much as humanly possible until the enemy explodes into a spray of floating items that always feel trivial.
Despite requiring a Wiimote, the game only requires the motion-sensitive aspect of the controller for two things. The first is for finishing team attacks, where the player performs two motions. If successful, massive damage is dealt. The other aspect is discovering hidden crates via finding the crate with your cursor and flicking the Wiimote. The crates always contain money to upgrade one of your characters. This mechanic is clunky and feels like a deliberate way to slow down the game.
The game, while marketed as a platformer or a navigation-heavy game, as well as a “beat-“˜em-up” game, feels as though the platforming element is missing. The levels are just a matter of walking from point A to point B with obnoxious tutorials guiding the player through the game. Each enemy varies only slightly, making them all seem approachable and able to be defeated in the same manner. And because of this, the game packs very few surprises.
Easily the most painful element of the game ““ aside from the redundancy ““ is the exceedingly punishing difficulty that lies behind dying. The entire level is undone and you are forced to restart far back. Without checkpoints or a life system, this can make certain fights beyond frustrating.
All in all, despite the colorful and intriguing graphics, the game lacks the ability to keep a mature audience’s attention for very long. The combat feels repetitive and the combos that are provided are hard to pull off and rarely are worth it when you do.
If you are still into Saturday morning cartoons, you’ll enjoy the fun feeling you get from destroying massive robots. Otherwise, this is not your game.