Developer FredBear Game Ltd has released Spirit Roots onto the Nintendo Switch, a port of a game already available on PC, iOS, and Android. The platformer provides colorful and great looking backgrounds for players to right their way through. Unfortunately, imprecise movement and controls make this game more frustrating than enjoyable.

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The story begins with a recap of the history of a warlike star system where armed conflict raged for a hundred years. In the end, the destruction wrought by ceaseless fighting left only one small piece of each of the planets. The inhabitants of each planet knew that survival would only come through peace. They stitched together the remaining pieces of their worlds into one large planet and agreed to leave each other alone to avoid the destruction of everyone.

Our main character finds himself separated from his family, and the only way to find and rescue them is to violate the agreement.

Lovely Art And Autumn Vibes

The colors and level design, while quickly repetitive, are enjoyable to look at. The feelings evoked are of an autumn harvest and look great with the passing of Halloween. The developer describes the game as looking like and perhaps inspired a bit by Coraline, and it is not difficult to see why. There are ten unique enemies to encounter and they look as though there were created in a workshop by a lover of all things steampunk.

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Each boss is also unique in appearance and challenge, and the overall artistic design of the game has clearly had thought and care put into it.

Unspirited Controls

The first five levels or so are simple, straightforward, and meant to introduce the player to the fundamental aspects of the game. Combat and dealing with opponents follow a strict one-hit rule that sends players back to the start of a level or their last checkpoint. Here is where the frustration begins to kick in.

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Combat consists of using a ranged pistol, or a buster sword that looks almost exactly like Cloud’s from Final Fantasy VII. Normal opponents need two to three hits to be dispatched, but the hit animation is on a delay. This means that if a player swings twice in quick succession, the first hit will register and send the opponent into their reaction animation, but the second attack will pass through them harmlessly, leaving you open for a quick death.

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This complaint is not a major one, as players can easily adjust their swing speed to counteract this animation timing. The controls, meanwhile are more frustrating when dealing with the environment. Death from an opponent is quite rare, but death from the environment was the number one problem throughout the game. Spikes line the bottom of pits and the sides of walls, with touching them resulting in death and being sent back to a checkpoint.

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The issue here is that the left Joy-Con is imprecise, especially when jumping. To ensure this was not the effect of a single controller, I also tried using theJoy-Con on an 8BitDo SN30 Pro controller and felt the same effects. This means that one must use the D-pad to ensure any kind of accuracy, but there are still issues, especially as a large portion of the later game is meant to be a challenging platformer with all of these environmental, one-hit-kill mechanics. If jumping and moving were simply a little tighter, this would be a more enjoyable game.

Ultimately, the controls make the game unenjoyable. A thorough reworking of them through a patch would merit a second look at this game, as it otherwise would be a great experience.

A Switch review code for Spirit Roots was provided to TheGamer for this review. Spirit Roots is available now for the Nintendo Switch, PC, iOS, and Android.

Spirit Roots

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