Game Review: Spyborgs

Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

Spyborgs

For: Nintendo Wii

From: Bionic Games/Capcom

ESRB Rating: Teen (crude humor, fantasy violence, mild language)

It's the little things - some of them arguably beyond control - that undermine "Spyborgs," a likably odd little Capcom venture that, for reasons good and bad, recalls the company's earlier days as a feisty publisher of niche games in which inventive concepts and unpredictable execution mingled freely.

The oddity of the concept starts at the name, which makes the game sound like either a licensed Saturday Morning Cartoon product or yet another "Pokemon" knockoff hoping to strike gold on a Nintendo system. In fact, "Spyborgs" is neither, but rather a wholly original property that plays like a hybrid between "Devil May Cry"-style games and a 3D interpretation of Capcom's terrific sidescrolling brawler games ("Final Fight," "Captain Commando") from the 1990s.

The general gist - choose from three playable characters and, using a combination of melee and shooting attacks, take out every enemy robot you see before advancing to the next area and repeating - is exactly what a marriage of those two games would lead you to believe it is. "Spyborgs" very quickly demonstrates a thorough understanding of the kind of action it wants to present, and surprisingly little time passes before it drops you into a rather frantic area in which robots descend from all sides.

At the very same time, though, "Spyborgs" quickly bares its biggest weakness: a dependency on a controller configuration - the Wii remote and nunchuck attachment - that proves surprisingly ill-fit for a genre that doesn't really ask for much in that department. All three playable characters' default attacks are mapped to the B button, which is a trigger and hardly ideal for rapid button presses. Secondary attacks are mapped to the nunchuck's clumsy C and Z buttons, while the only ideal button - that big A button on the remote - goes to waste on a jump maneuver that only sparingly comes in handy.

Those awkward button placements obviously aren't developer Bionic Games' fault, and a pretty fun ability to uncover invisible objects using the remote's pointer while the action rages on means "Spyborgs" can't just allow the Classic or Wavebird controllers as alternate input methods. There's no way to remap buttons to at least mitigate the issues, so it's just something with which players have to deal.

For those willing to do so, the good news is that the game's necessary evils don't completely overshadow its upside. As stated earlier, "Spyborgs" has its act together in terms of speed and challenge, and while there's nothing extraordinarily original about the overall design, the semi-cartoony style is pleasantly easy on the eyes.

Like its 1990s forefathers, "Spyborgs" also is most fun - and, in terms of its shortcomings, easier to forgive - when two players take it on together. It's only a shame the game didn't go one better and make it a three-player game. There are three selectable characters, the game has enough enemy robots to go around, and the Wii supports it, so why not?

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