Spirit Mancer

The gaming media has a bad habit of describing new games as being “like” other things. And look, as someone that talks and writes about video games on a pretty regular basis, I get it; that shorthand can be very useful in succinctly conveying information to you, the reader, without me having to painstakingly explain what a “metroidvania” or “soulslike” is in every other review I write. Sometimes, though, I think this shorthand can do more harm than good when it comes to setting proper expectations, and Spirit Mancer, described as a mashup of Mega Man, Pokémon, and Slay the Spire, ended up being a victim of this—when I hear names like that all lined up in a row, it’s putting something extremely lofty in my head that I think would be near impossible for any developer to reach.

One can see how this description came about, though, as the broad strokes are all here: you’ll be running across side-scrolling stages as one of two characters, Sebastian or Mary, using a combination of melee weapons and guns to fight demons. If you’re able to break an enemy’s shields down without killing them, you can then capture them in a card and store them in your deck, ready to be unleashed at will as a friendly assistant to help during combat. From what I could tell, every enemy in the game save bosses could be captured, and it is undeniably cool to shred the shields of a large, chunky enemy four times your size, seal them away in card form, and then unleash them on unsuspecting enemies later in the level.

Most of that satisfaction is coming from the visuals, which are an undeniable treat in Spirit Mancer. Everything is beautifully animated, sometimes to the point of being a bit absurd; your first playable moments in the game see Sebastian running around naked and covering his sensitive areas with his hands as he goes, a genuinely fun comedic bit that largely works because of how great all of his frames of animation look, despite the fact that it’s a throwaway opening bit that lasts for a couple dozen seconds. In particular, the backgrounds were downright stunning at times, some of the best I’ve ever seen blaring out at me from my Switch OLED’s screen, even going so far as to remind me of some arcade fighting games from the 90s. I’d be remiss not to mention how much I love the main friendly race of the game, which amounts to just cute lil anthropomorphic pig people; anytime those piggies were involved in a cutscene, or I got back from a mission and saw one dressed up in a French maid outfit cleaning the house I was staying in, I had a smile on my face.

That love and attention to detail in the visuals doesn’t just make this one of the prettier games I’ve played this year, as they extend to the gameplay mechanics as well. As mentioned above, every enemy you encounter has at least one shield, usually far more than that as you get further into the game, and each type of shield is color-coded. Green indicates you should come at your opponent with melee, guns for blue shields, and summoned demons if you see a purple one. In a game with lesser art direction, trying to parse through all of that information while swapping between your various weapons and verbs (and all while dodging attacks!), could be an absolute nightmare, but Spirit Mancer ends up feeling exceedingly elegant in this regard, and I couldn’t help but be impressed by the game on the visual front. Unfortunately, that’s just about the most praise I can give Spirit Mancer. If I can put it as bluntly as possible, I just don’t think the combat feels good, which is a pretty big knock against a game like this. Any enemy with multiple shields ends up feeling extremely tanky, and God help you if you want to try and fight multiple enemies at once, each with 3+ shields to break.

One of the earlier stages has a section where you’re being chased along a pier, with enemies also coming at you from the front to slow you down. This set piece ended up instilling in me the idea that I could, and should, run from most encounters, unless I was low on demon cards and wanted to restock. And frankly, by the fifth main mission, that was exactly what I was doing. It doesn’t help that the game is largely fairly straightforward and easygoing. That is until you suddenly get to an assassin boss that is sniping at you atop some trees only accessible via imprecise platforming, again while being shot at. This dude has a health bar that would make Ganondorf ala The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom upon it in envy, and also happens to have an extreeeeeeeeeeeemely looooooooooooooooooooooooooong phase he likes to go into where he throws grenades at you while you’re being attacked by clones of yourself. This “phase” lasts for actual minutes, happens multiple times, oh, and you can’t actually damage the boss during any of it. And if you get a game over during it, be prepared to trek from left to right across the entire level from the start again just to get back and try the boss again.

And this is just one of the bosses. Not even the final boss! No, they’re not all as soul-crushingly obnoxious as this one, but they are all just as tanky. And they’re all frankly pretty bad, which is a death knell for me in a game billing itself as something in the vein of Mega Man Zero. Difficulty or accessibility options could alleviate some of these frustrations, but I found none. Even the game’s main unique gameplay feature, summoning demon allies from cards, ends up landing with a dull thud when you realise that the vast majority of them don’t really help much outside of specifically being able to take down purple shields, and some of them felt completely useless period (I’m looking directly at you, cactus). Not every card should feel game-breakingly powerful, of course, but at least a couple of them should, and the game just left me feeling like my character was an annoying mosquito sloooowly taking down borderline catatonic giants who didn’t really care that I was trying to kill them for the vast majority of its runtime.

There are side missions available, but these largely boil down to smaller levels tasking you with doing the same things you do in the main levels anyway, just in a more digestible form and sometimes with a cute wrapper, like going on a “date” with a fish lady or protecting a village of those cute piggies. You may still be stuck in the tedious bog that is Spirit Mancer’s combat, but at least there’s pigs yelling “S.O.S.” in the background to make me feel something again. The game also features some side activities like fishing, gardening, and sending pig warriors out on quests to gather materials for you, but these amount to little more than distractions unless you’re going for 100% completion. Frankly, I recommend that you do not.