Assault Spy is a Hack & Slash title in where we play as a struggling spy called Asaru. Most of his problems lie with his partner Kanoko, who is so over the top and loud that any chance of stealth immediately flies out the window. Luckily this spy is just quite proficient in fighting and uses his briefcase as his primary weapon. This briefcase has some fancy lighting but functions in a fight just as you’d imagine it to, by knocking the living daylights out of someone with it. In this case, all of your foes are robotic in nature, ranging from sentient cellphones, traffic cones, and Segways to name a few. It is just as silly as it sounds and oozes a great deal of humor & style in every aspect of it.
Starting off, your briefcase will be your only means of attack, alongside your exploding business cards that you can throw for some ranged damage. You will have a single button to attack and another to launch your foe into the air as to follow up with a heavy combo while he is in that defenseless state. It is simple at first, yet slowly and surely introduces new gadgets as well as skills to the mix. Let’s talk about the skill system first. It rewards you with what is known as “Skill Points” after every encounter and the better you do, the more you’ll receive. They are used to not only upgrade your skills but to gain new functions to preexisting gadgets such as attaching a shotgun to your umbrella. If that isn’t motivation to vary things up in combat, I don’t know what is.
That same umbrella can also be upgraded to deflect projectiles if you time a charge attack with it just right. There are nowhere near enough skill points to unlock much of what is available in one play-through of the content currently available, so you will have time to get proficient with what you choose and gradually receive more options to how you go about things. Some of your other tools include an Overclock Watch that temporarily slows down time and allows you to quickly dispatch enemies, as well as your partner Kanoko. She is surprisingly enough, possibly one of your most valuable assets as she will draw the attention of enemies, allowing you to quickly get in behind them without wading through a hail of gunfire. Later on, she can also be upgraded to launch enemies into the air and other useful abilities to open up or extend your combos.
You have quite a bit of destructive power behind your weapons that are disguised as office equipment. Most foes will quickly go down once you are up close and personal. It’s actually getting to them that can be difficult. A large portion of them have long ranged attacks and six hits are as much that you can take. Be it a gunshot, or a traffic cone diving into you, it will take off a pip of health and they can add up rapidly if you get sloppy. You are very much encouraged to dash between cubicles or any other object that will break their line of sight as you make your way towards them. One area had a maze-like design filled with breakable glass which I found to be a great idea. It was a ton of fun to put to use and quickly create a getaway or get the jump on a patrolling enemy by shattering a new pathway towards him. I would love to see more arenas like that later on.
There is no sneaking or exploring to be had. You simply walk from area to area before most of the environment is cordoned off into a small to medium sized arena. When not fighting all there is to see is the occasional vending machine to smash apart for food items which refill your health and an area to upgrade your skills. It is all about the action and while it starts off easy, it will soon test your mettle. The enemies you will be facing are an interesting lot, to say the least. They range from a variety of common items like the aforementioned cellphone and traffic cones. While admittedly adorable, they are all too willing to shoot you in the face or punch your shins if you gawk for too long. There is a fair amount of unique foes to face, all equally ridiculous yet require different methods to take down as they get progressively deadlier. Even the starting enemies get their hands on new weapons to stay a threat, like the cellphones firing heat-seeking rockets or wielding a shield to neglect all your frontal attacks.
Dashing will soon become a critical ability to get the hang of as you are pelted with increasingly large barrages of projectiles. Waiting until the last second to dash out of the way will trigger a flashy animation and will net you quite a bit of skill points after the battle for those willing to take the risk. You will need to pull out all the stops when you encounter a boss fight. That is where the majority of the game’s challenge comes from and it will chew you up if you get cocky. There are seven boss fights in total, with none being more difficult than those that have you facing the advanced robots known as The Officers.
Officers have recently been added into the game and are not at all balanced to be friendly to the more casual players, which may be a problem considering there is only a single difficulty mode to choose from as of now. They are a ton of fun to fight, but the combination of them containing a ton of frames where you can’t interrupt an attack and how often they activate said awesome flashy attacks, can make it a bit of an uphill battle. Your overclock gadget is meant to be at its most useful here, however, activating it absolutely kills my frame-rate. It will jump from a locked sixty fps to around five randomly, making it near impossible to control as it appears from your end that you are teleporting short distances. I’ve tested it on three different systems with the only thing they shared in common being having Nvidia GPUs and all running Windows 10. The game ran flawlessly outside of that issue.
Now the main culprit for the boss fights being so difficult is the targeting/camera system. You have to hold down a button to track a foe. It is a huge problem with the boss sizable boss arenas, in inclusion to their ability to teleport and quickly maneuver around the place. Your only other option is to manually control the camera which is just as hard to do when you have so many buttons to press at any given time. It is all too easy to get blind sighted during these fights and constantly lose one of your valuable six health pips. A simple on or off button for targeting an opponent instead of having to hold it would help immensely. Once again, it is an Early Access title so it being rough around the edges in some regards isn’t unexpected, I just really hope that this is something they take notice of.
Some others flaws involve how restrained your movement while sprinting is. You are very limited to how much you can influence your character’s running direction and for the most part, you’ll be forced to run in a straight line. Another minor thing is having to press the dash button when you load into an area as your character will more often than not be immediately stuck. Speaking off areas, you are given some leeway as to how you tackle things after the prologue mission. You’ll have a base of sorts and from there you can choose where to head to next, all containing an Officer at the end. From the main menu, there is a Dojo you can make use of which allows you to spawn in enemies to either learn their patterns or just practice your moves against. It is a useful way to learn how to use any new abilities and quite a welcome addition.
Aside from the combat and excellent style this game contains, easily the next biggest selling points are the characters themselves. Each is a ton of fun to listen to in their own right and their interactions have got to be some of the funniest dialogue I’ve encountered in a while. Humor is one of the most subjective things to talk about, but it will be very hard to not at least grin like a fool all throughout. There is quite a bit of talking throughout and all of the characters are voice acted in Japanese. Characters in the cut-scenes used for dialogue will appear in a 2D anime style and in actual gameplay are fully 3D. Both art-styles are nice to look at. The environments while small can look stunning at times as the shadows contrast with the ultra clean floors and the particle effects fly about in the heat of battle.
As of this review, you can only play as one of the two planned characters and there are around 4 hours of content to bite into. You will not unlock anywhere near to everything the first time through, so there is some incentive to play through it again. All in all, I’d say they really nailed what makes this genre so much fun with it’s fast-paced and combo-centric gameplay. They try to shake things up with things such as having landmines in the arena that you can kite your enemy toward and zones with very narrow areas as you battle on top of skyscrapers, to name a few scenarios. Not to mention the creative weapons to use, lovable characters, and bizarre enemies you’ll face that makes Assault Spy a game you’ll do well to keep an eye on as it progresses. You haven’t lived until you fought a mech-piloting traffic cone using your briefcase and an umbrella.
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