Spellagis – PS5 Review

Spellagis is an auto-shooter/survivors game from Shokin-dev/Nipobox and it’s published by eastasiasoft.  If you’re not familiar with the genre, this is a homage of the now very popular Vampire Survivors or, if you’re a real connoisseur, Brotato (arguably this reviewer’s favourite game).

As with other examples of the genre, you basically have to defend yourself in a series of arenas as ‘hordes’ of enemies advance on your position.  However, your input is a little limited.  Essentially, you only control three things.

The first is movement.  You move your mage with the left stick and, at first at least, you’ll need to weave in and out of danger in order to survive.  In terms of the core gameplay, that’s it.  You don’t get to aim or shoot, the game takes care of that for you and while that might seem odd if you’re new to all of this, it really can work, as evidenced by the games we mentioned above.  And so all you really need to do is move around, collect coins that fallen enemies drop and survive for however long the wave lasts.

The second thing you can control is your choice of perks every time you finish a wave (of which there are fifteen).  You’ll get a choice of four and generally these come down to improved stats (movement speed, firing speed, damage, damage resistance and so on) or extra weapons (occasionally you’ll fire an extra projectile or maybe you’ll get a stationary tower weapon).  Picking the right perks is important but the answer in this game usually comes down to buy extra offense wherever you can.

The final thing you have a say in happens between games.  Here you can purchase permanent upgrades (again, start with damage and go from there) which not only will improve your progression but are pretty much mandatory.  You’re not getting very far into the game without them.  But, that said, this isn’t a challenging game at all.  Unlike Vampire Survivors and Brotato, you never really get stuck in Spellagis.  You don’t really ever have to grind or brute force things as your progress pretty much keeps pace with the uptake in difficulty between the game’s twenty stages with each one increasing either the attack power or durability of your foes.

Indeed, we probably only failed to complete a stage a couple of times and both times that came down to one thing:  the game’s rubbish collision detection.  There’s such a lack of precision to the whole thing and there’s not really much of a sense that you’ve been hit.  But, yeah, it’s an issue.

There are other problems too though.  Firstly, the game is just very unexciting.   The twenty stages all look, feel and play exactly the same.  The same enemies, the same basic backdrop, the same gameplay.  Nothing changes.  If you look at Brotato, there are very specific differences between stages and between how characters play but here it’s all the same.  You do eventually unlock a roster of eight mages to play as but they all feel much the same as each other (apart from the guy who fires spread shots).  And your enemies barely ever seem to get over twenty or so either, apart from on the final wave, so don’t expect to ever see massive hordes like you do in better games.

From the basic graphics and sound to the very simplistic gameplay, Spellagis feels like a student project at best.  A first attempt at making a Survivors-like.  And it’s a shame because we like this genre so much when it’s done well.  But this game doesn’t do it well at all.  The only plus is that it’s not your usual thirty minute max – you do, at least, get a few hours out of this one – but even so, you probably won’t look forward to re-maxing it on the included PS4 version.