I don’t typically like to get mean about a game when I review it. Regardless of how bad a work might be or how little I might like it, I recognize that behind the polygons and lines of code were people writing and drawing and programming it. It’s not nothing to make a game, even if it’s bad, and right now I think it might serve us all well to remember that even in non-essential industries like video games — hell, all arts — the people who make games are workers and their work has value.
That being said, I did not like Spyder, a game by Sumo Digital, very much at all, and I’m kind of disappointed in it.
Let’s talk a little bit about mobile gaming for a moment before I dive into the review. Listen, y’all. It’s been twelve years since Apple introduced the App Store to the iOS ecosystem, and the mobile games space has been around for nearly the entire time. Phones and tablets are powerful as hell now, and it’s disingenuous to continue to assert that mobile devices are of lesser status than consoles or desktop and portable PCs. Despite the leaps and bounds that mobile devices have come in twelve years, a lot of folks continue to treat iOS and Android like inferior platforms, and thus the medium has struggled to find legitimacy. This isn’t helped by the glut of “easy money” games — shoddy free-to-play experiences that rely on an overabundance of ads and constant microtransaction purchases from their player bases.
Last fall, Apple Arcade forced a new possibility space open in mobile gaming, and for all its problems both practical and existential, it brought some of last year’s best games to Apple devices. What the Golf?, Tangle Tower, Shinsekai Into The Depths, Neo Cab, Mutazione, Guildlings and Manifold Garden are just some of the incredible games we played last year, and while we still haven’t gotten through all of the offerings, Apple Arcade has established itself as a place to find good games for iPhone and iPad (not to mention Apple TV and macOS).
So it’s exciting when a game studio with an impressive pedigree like Sumo Digital comes along with an Apple Arcade exclusive. On paper, Spyder should be a blockbuster. Developed by a major studio whose teams have worked with larger developers like Microsoft and Sega for decades to bring us experiences like the Forza series, LittleBigPlanet 3 and Sonic Team Racing, to say nothing of the studios they’ve acquired, like thechineseroom — Spyder’s conceit is at least a bit interesting and it looks good. Apple Arcade creative producer Mark Bozon posted a quick let’s play of the tutorial level on Apple’s YouTube channel and it’s featured on their website. There’s some buzz around the game, and we were excited to try it. Unfortunately, expectations had to meet reality.
First of all, it’s incredibly short. Like, two hours of gameplay at most. Most of your time will be spent wrestling with the overbearing camera, but when you do manage to play the game, it’s a pretty straightforward puzzle game. All objectives are clearly marked, and every task involves simple button presses/screen taps and analog stick rotations/finger drags. Even here, controls are finicky, but they’re head and shoulders above moving or looking around.
Second, there is almost no narrative to speak of. You’re Agent 8, a mechanical bug (y’all, spiders have eight dang legs and you gave this child six) whose aesthetic can be best summed up as “imagine if Boston Dynamics built an anatomically-incorrect jumping spider and made it adorable.” You’re a spy robot for EP-8, a British spy agency, and your enemy is a group called S.I.N. This group goes around trying to blow stuff up, and as a tiny mechanical friend, Agent 8’s job is to sabotage them at every turn. It’s a simple conceit, but there’s literally nothing in the way of a backstory or even a reason for being. You simply scuttle around empty rooms, following Dr. Aran’s directions until your objective is met. Even a little connective tissue here would improve things greatly, but as it is, Spyder is just a short series of spy novel vignettes where you save the world one train, space capsule and defused nuke at a time.
I do want to be clear: some of these moments are legitimately great! In the space capsule mission, there was a sequence where I had to jump from piece of debris to piece of debris, hurtling through space and thousands of miles an hour, using my grappling tool to throw random chunks of matter out of my path. I legitimately enjoyed that moment! And it was made even better by the fact that the camera behaved appropriately the whole time! If the entire game was like that, I think I’d feel better about its length and lack of story. As is, it’s just kind of disappointing.
Who knows. Maybe Spyder will improve. I don’t want to shit on the work the dev team at Sumo have done here, because it genuinely looks console-class here. In that same vein, the game only just came out on Friday, and it’s possible that future updates will address everything I’m griping about here. I certainly would like to see new stuff added to it and mechanics improved if possible. But you can’t review a game as you want it to be; you have to review the game you have in front of you. As it stands, I don’t know if I would recommend it.