'Spyborgs' not bad, just boring

• By JOSHUA WASCOM
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: Oct 29, 2009

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"Spyborgs” is a 3-D beat’em up, with a story that lives up to the Saturday-morning-cartoon silliness of the title. Someone has been kidnapping the eponymous cybernetically enhanced heroes, and it’s up to you to put a stop to the disappearances in the traditional way -- beating up a countless horde of evil robots.

Brawlers aren’t usually very complex games. Lately, most seem to follow the “God of War” three-part formula. You fight groups of enemies that gradually increase in power and number, you try to pull off longer and longer chains of combos, and you periodically trade in hard-earned points to upgrade your abilities. What really distinguish one game from another are the finer details -- things like careful level design, interesting abilities, and varied enemies.

Unfortunately, no one told the creators of “Spyborgs” about the whole distinguishing characteristics thing, so their final product feels stripped-down and repetitive. The basics are here, and they’re even well-executed, but there simply aren’t any further embellishments. The upgrade system is perfunctory, the enemies are bland, and the levels are only differentiable based on the background scenery and how annoying the lighting is.

A few aspects slip from this passive monotony into a more active frustration. Somewhat unresponsive controls and a very lenient combo counter combine to strongly encourage a mindless, button-mashing gameplay experience. The requisite inclusion of Wii Remote motion controls for some actions doesn’t help – although, thankfully, you can turn most of them off.

The game does do a few interesting things. Co-op makes every game better, and a second player can join or leave at any time. The Wii Remote’s pointer functionality also sees some use: there are invisible objects -- including enemies -- scattered throughout each level, and you have to point the remote at them to make them visible. Sadly, the novelty of this last feature wears thin really quickly, and it becomes just another thing you have to do over and over.

The game’s sole bright point is really the co-op, but that’s sort of a cop-out, since everything is more fun with people you like. It does have much less realistic violence than most beat’em ups, so that it might be more appropriate to play with your children. For every else, though …well, like so many games, “Spyborgs” is never terrible. It’s just not good enough to be worth playing.