SPRay (Wii)

I have given quite a few games flak for bad or unusual titles, but SPRay’s certainly stands out from the crowd. The name Spray is actually quite good, a perfect fit for a game about spraying different fluids around a 3D environment to solve platforming puzzles and fight foes. However, Spray is not the game’s actual title, that instead being SPRay, something that looks like a typo where someone held down the shift key too long. SPRay is actually an attempt to build an acronym without any commitment to the idea, the title’s odd attempt at abbreviation referring to the game’s hero, Spirited Prince Ray. Unfortunately, this half-hearted attempt at an almost good title is surprisingly indicative of the quality of the game it has been attached to.

 

The game takes place in the world of Ecoia where the Crystal Sun protects the people from the forces of darkness, but the monstrous Queen Mordak is able to break the protection by shattering the sun with a meteor, the crystals scattering all around the world as Mordak’s troops and their dark antimatter begin to take over. The king of Ecoia dies in the invasion, but his spirit is able to guide his adopted son Ray, the young prince relying on the assistance of two spirits tied to the crown he inherits. One is the straight-laced and angelic water fairy Liad and the other is the crass and monstrous spirit Gush, these two guiding Ray during his quest and providing their ability to spray many different types of liquids to overcome the obstacles and enemies he faces along the way.

SPRay’s spray mechanics are actually fairly impressive. Controlled by pointing the Wii Remote where you want your allies to fire, the fluid coats surfaces and interacts with certain parts of the environment. The levels in SPRay have a few different goals that will require you to leave a level after your get the current level goal’s crystal to play an altered version of the stage, but since many puzzles and obstacles are overcome by placing the right fluids in the right places, the game remembers the placement of all liquids in a level down to even the most insignificant coated surfaces, this allowing the player to easily overcome a previously challenging area if its part of making their way to a new objective. The only time the game won’t store the liquid placement in its memory involves things like enemy or item spawn points that need to wipe away the liquid to place their own body or substances, and there seems to be no slowdown associated with coating a level in as much gunk as you like. This technical feat is partly impressive because of how many glitches and bugs can be found in almost every other part of its design.

 

Over the course of the game you unlock different fluids to use, but only the basic ones seem free of design problems. Water has pretty clear uses like cleaning surfaces you’ve coated with other options or putting out fires, and Vomit is Gush’s go-to for doing some basic battle tasks or revealing hidden objects without draining the shared reserves the other liquid types share. Liad’s Ice ability is the first where things can start to get unwieldy, ice used to gain speed by running across it but the reliability of getting the longer jump from a running start isn’t perfect. It has a similar issue to the much more annoying Slime ability where if a surface isn’t coated just right, the vital role it plays can be sabotaged and you’ll be sent plummeting to your death, a problem offset only by infinite lives and somewhat forgiving checkpoints. Slime can help you stick to objects, a fact often used to have you traverse ceilings and ramps that you otherwise couldn’t walk across, but if you have not coated every inch of these important surfaces and Ray happens to brush his foot against a slime-free area, he will drop down, often undoing an already tedious process of moving slowly across the sticky surface. Slime also allows Ray to ground pound a surface to bounce off of it, but this isn’t wholly reliable either as he can sometimes slide down a slanted platform without bouncing if the game didn’t like how you lined it up. Antimatter is the last spray type acquired, this usually being the dark substance enemies use that you can get trapped in and need to shake the remote to break free, but it can also reveal hidden portals that are absolutely necessary for traversing later levels. Problem is, where these portals are is rarely clear, and while you do have a radar that tries to guide you down the right path to your current goal’s crystal, there were multiple cases where I had practically coated every part of a room or wall in antimatter and still hadn’t triggered the right small spot to make a portal appear.

The technical issues with your spray and design problems like the hidden portals are definitely a shame because there is a lot of room for creativity with them, some shining through despite the awkwardness. Timed ice puzzles, using slime to fight harsh winds, revealing long invisible pathways with vomit… it all had the potential to make for a fun puzzle platformer, but there are still many more glitches that can hamper your adventure outside of the ones built into your abilities. Objectives not triggering properly, triggering by arbitrary unrelated actions like entering the right area when the goal was supposed to be destroying the Queen’s eggs, or not notifying you that an objective has been fulfilled such as a lightning fence that is meant to disappear after a certain condition and may still appear to be on even though you can now get around it. In one instance, I needed to weigh down a switch with a sphere but the gate it triggered kept opening and closing rapidly. While on the other side of it, I used the Slime to stick the ball to the switch, only for that ball to get stuck in a way that the gate was now permanently closed, meaning its use for backtracking during that objective was impossible. In one area with a platform that you’re meant to stand on with slime and have it flip over so you can walk upside-down, the platform repeatedly threw Ray off with little reason, the times it worked indistinguishable from the ones where it decided to chuck him off. Fans that were meant to be turned off to let you pass in one of the ice tower levels were still blowing air after being deactivated, and it was certainly not the only case of something being active or inactive when seemingly in the alternate state. These glitches and bugs aren’t so common that you’ll see one at every turn, but they almost always add extra time or frustration to the affair when they crop up, sometimes even ruining the moments the game gets on a roll with its enjoyable uses of the fluids.

 

SPRay’s levels are varied in design and layout even when they’re repeating ideas like ruins or icy towers, but the objectives for each of them are often very similar. The focus on platforming to a specific location isn’t bad because it often involves overcoming many small challenges to get there, but almost every level has a quest to find a certain amount of parchments and later destroy the eggs of the Queen that constantly hatch new enemies. These are also often meant to just guide you through new areas in the level, but the goals lack creativity and the Queen egg quests especially are just retreading everywhere you’ve already been and doing a small task every now and then along the way. Bosses are sadly underwhelming since they are rare and don’t really ask for creative uses of your powers, but regular combat itself is mostly just about waving your sword at them until they eventually die, only a few requiring things like slipping them up on ice, stunning them with slime, or putting out the fires on them. You’ll often be wrestling more with the camera than struggling against an enemy, but the bigger insult is that SPRay requires you to collect every single Crystal to see its ending, enforcing its repetition even though it tries to break up repeat visits to a level by spacing out the opportunities to return to them. Pearls are hidden around levels to serve as a collectible to occupy your time and provide little additional challenges, but these are just for unlocking undercooked multiplayer minigames that inevitably carry over the technical flaws of the main game. SPRay does have some little success in all these areas, but it feels like all of them are conditional, even its most enjoyable puzzles having to struggle to get past the game’s inherent issues to register as somewhat decent gameplay moments.

THE VERDICT: SPRay’s half capitalized title is a good indicator of how it does everything in half-measures. The liquid mechanics it could have used for clever puzzle solving and interesting combat are underutilized and tend to hurt the better puzzles with their technical flaws. Level goals are often the same recycled concepts that require utilizing the same aspects of the liquids to complete, and when you do get in a battle, it’s usually a mindless flail fest or a straightforward use of a spray in a fight that’s still a bit too tedious for its own good. Moments of inspiration and interesting platforming do exist, but they can’t stand out against the mess that is much of SPRay.

 

And so, I give SPRay for Wii…

A TERRIBLE rating. SPRay’s glitches and poor design are definitely a constant worry while playing, but the regular moments of play give you frequent enough breaks from them that the game can’t quite be declared an absolute failure. Unfortunately, even at its best it’s often mediocre or unimaginative or just held back by the finicky detection of fluid placement. If they were all more lenient instead of rigidly demanding every pixel of a surface must be sticky or icy to work then that would ease up a lot of the frustrating moments despite other technical glitches, and things like the antimatter portals could have been done much better with subtle clues to their placement instead of just hoping you’ll find the right spot on the wall eventually. It really feels like too much emphasis was put on the impressive feat of retaining all fluid placement rather than ensuring even basic platforming is up to snuff, and while the game’s concept is a unique one with a lot of potential, not enough creativity was put into designing the puzzles and objectives to really challenge the concept beyond a few basic effective moments.

 

SPRay’s name is awful, but it’s a good indicator of the content you find in the game. A good concept done poorly, something that has most of it done decently until it fumbles and can’t think of new ways to use it or fails to properly bring what ideas it does have together thanks to its poor programing priorities. SPRay is an idea that could be great if done by the right team, but it hardly feels like anything was realized as intended in this ambitious yet sloppy Wii game.