Spyder - Apple Arcade Review
- Originally teased in early 2019, Spyder has just released on Apple Arcade in March, 2020 as an exclusive title. Brought to you by Sumo Digital, you may remember one of their popular, previous games, Snake Pass. Today, I'm going to present my initial thoughts on this puzzle adventure game, give some constructive feedback, and showcase how it performs across all my apple devices.
I first spotted Spyder early on in its development, when it won the internal Game Jam competition in 2017. After this, according to Nic Cusworth, lead designer at Sumo Digital, the team put together an early demo and presented it to Apple. Apple loved it and decided that the game would fit perfectly under the Apple Arcade service.
It was built using the Unreal Engine, which allows the game to look visually outstanding, even on low-end hardware. I'd actually say it's one of, if not the best-looking games on Apple Arcade right now. Close to Oceanhorn 2 or Hot Lava. Don't go into this game thinking it plays like Snake Pass, though.
That said, if you enjoyed that game, fans will still be super happy here. But you also have to enjoy puzzle-solving, that's for sure. You see, compared to the snake, this mechanical spy spider, known as Agent 8, can walk over almost any terrain with ease.
With some surfaces being more difficult or impossible, later on in the campaign. You also had access to cool abilities to solve puzzles from a grappling hook, to reach distant places. A screwdriver to, well, undo screws. A web-splat mechanic, to hit buttons.
A tool to slice through different objects. And strong legs to pick up items. All these mechanics are well-thought out and are really cool to witness. Especially when Agent 8, rips out the screwdriver from his back. I love the retro aesthetic and the sound design.
Simple things from when the little spider makes chirp sounds to indicate that he's happy, sad, anxious or worried was just a really nice, small, little feature. And also, you get a great feel for how small this spider is. With ginormous, everyday objects and people to provide somewhat of reference of how tiny he really is.
All that said, it's not a perfect game. I have a few, minor issues. First, I'm not sure if I'm a fan of how you use two fingers to look around. I'd prefer it to just be moved using the left-side of the screen with one finger and camera movement can be on the right-side of the screen with your other finger.
In its current state, I find the touch controls rather awkward. So using a controller is highly recommended. Or if you're on a Mac, keyboard will do just fine. That said, Sumo also need to hide the Mac cursor icon. Then we have the issue of the camera.
Instead of using a third-person viewpoint, Sumo have gone for a more multi-angle camera. This resulted in the spider often moving in the wrong direction unintentionally. There were glitches with the camera positioning and on the very odd occasion, I completely lost the little fella.
Hopefully Sumo, look into this, based upon everyone's feedback that should come on the app store or on social media in the coming days, weeks. I would also like Sumo to add a hints feature. I think it would be incredibly useful for those moments when you get completely lost.
Which often happened during my playtime, but then again, I'm not very good at puzzles. Even though I enjoy them. Perhaps, if you haven't completed an objective in, let's say five to 10 minutes, a hint should pop up. Speaking of objectives, I always found it distracting that this objective window always stayed on screen.
You don't need to display it for the whole time, Sumo. Instead, maybe it can appear for a minute or so, and then it can just disappear. And then when you complete the objective, the new one appears for a few minutes or whatever. And if you want to know what the objective is, you can just go to the menu and it's right there.
But yeah, those are just some small, little things. But how does the game perform across my devices? If it wasn't already noticeable, across all my devices, the visual quality is stellar. Whilst Sumo Digital, do not allow you to manually change any graphical settings here, I'd say there is no need for this anyway, as when you launch the game, it will run at the best settings for your device.
And it's not a very demanding game. My devices are able to maintain a high frame-rate on average, only sometimes dipping in more challenging or open scenarios. This was more common on my iPhone XR. The interesting thing is that my 5K iMac, it reaches upwards of 100 frames.
However, since the display of this iMac is 60HZ, it's not really noticeable. Anyway, are you going to play Spyder on your Apple device? Do you think it's the best Apple Arcade game to release so far in 2020? What do you think of the controls? And what do you just think of the game overall? Let me know in the comments.
