Spyborgs is appropriately optimized for today’s Twitter length attention span. The first level is broken into mini stages you can run through in seconds. Beat a room of enemies, walk into a door, and suddenly the game congratulates you with “You Win!”.
Bionic Games might have broken levels into mini stages to mask load times. Even if this is the case, it’s pretty funny to see “You Win!” pop up so often.
In between stages you can switch characters and Spyborgs has three cyborgs. Bouncer is a slow moving brute, Stinger who resembles Captain Commando is the “average” guy, and Clandestine is a swift ninja.
When I reached the first boss battle I was using Bouncer and fought a robot that took up nearly half of the screen. The massive robot attacked by crushing the team with punches. You can dodge these by hitting Z to guard when an icon pops up. The robot also threw cars and shot bullets in a shmup style patterns the Spyborgs needed to jump over. Like a classic NES boss, the Spyborgs had to wait for the boss to walk up to a platform before they could hit it.
Hidden in the boss stage, and many other mini stages, are semi-visible crates. Before you can crack them open and release healing energy you need to point at the screen with the Wii remote to make them materialize.
Spyborgs also uses motion control during team attacks. Once you have a full super bar you can trigger a team attack, which has players follow motions on the screen like thrusting the nunchuck/remote forward or lifting them up. Team attack motions always start with the player who didn’t initiate the attack, so you’re encouraged to prepare your partner by saying “team attack” or something like that before you expunge your super meter.
Oh, and Spyborgs is always a two player game. The computer takes control of the second character if you don’t have a friend around. However, Spyborgs, like many other beat ’em up games, seems designed for co-op play.
