365//365: Day 077 – Spawn (SNES)

I have heard very little in terms of how the game was. Now that I think about it, I don’t even remember seeing a review on the game. So I really was not sure of what to expect from this one. What I ended up playing was a pretty interesting game, with some visible flaws, yet a lot going well for it.

The detail on Spawn and the major enemies are quite impressive for a 16 bit title.

Between stages, you are treated with comic book like images. The quality of art and colors are quite impressive for a Super Nintendo title. When you actually start playing the game, you’ll notice that Spawn and the backgrounds look pretty well detailed. Random thugs look decent enough, but Spawn and the various bosses and cameo appearances look great, and reminiscent enough of the comic book renditions.

The music is also quite good. Dark and brooding, it fits in well with the action going on. Oddly enough, it feels like I’m listening to a Castlevania soundtrack sometimes. Controlling Spawn is mostly passable. You have a weak punch, weak kick, strong punch, strong kick, a block and a jump available to you, but you end up using only the strong punch and down plus strong kick for slides, as weak attacks have little range and are, well, weak.

The cut scenes look quite impressive and set the mood perfectly for each stage.

Like I said, there’s a lot going for the game, however there are some annoyances as well. This is one of those games where thugs are almost a non issue, and the bosses are either a pain, or a non issue as well. The early stages, you will be able to one hit kill enemies, who come out in extremely slow waves of one, from the left or right. When you get to Overtkill, you will struggle for a bit until you realize you can just time your slide attack and beat him without taking more than two hits tops. Once you get to Redeemer, you’re struggling to get within melee range because he keeps running backwards to the right, while heaving torsos, heads and legs from statues he’s magically destroying. If you do some damage to him, he’ll heal himself right back up to full soon after. When he gets to a wall behind him, he starts charging an eye beam shot that, when it hits you, your health drops be nearly 50%. You can’t stop the beam, and you only have a split second to land one hit in between his eye beam shots. Took me a half dozen attempts to figure out that I should run into him to take minuscule damage and set off a temporary invulnerability as the beam is going to fire, and punch him on the face when I get the chance, and repeat that like 10 times.

You only have one life. Once you die though, you can continue right from the area you left off at. Thankfully, this offsets the frustration with the number of times you’ll need to tackle bosses. There’s a password system that lets you jump back to the action at a later time, or just skip by annoying bosses, like Redeemer. Some portions of some stages, you can just run to the right and avoid pitfalls and obstacles and get to the other side without fighting any enemy. Just jump over the first two, keep running, and they keep following slowly behind, blocking off any enemies from coming out ahead of you unless they are airborn. This further unbalances the difficulty. While you can just run by and worry about nearly nothing before a boss, defeating that said boss then turns into a huge pain.

One of the most annoying boss fights I've ever encountered.

If you actually take the time in killing the enemies as you see them and try to play the game in a straight forward manner, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn: The Video Game isn’t too bad. Its generic gameplay with pockets of a lot of ease, and pockets of sheer frustration, with a good look and great sound to it. I can see why I have never found much mention of this one, as it’s just a okay, rather forgettable game, even if you’re a Spawn enthusiast.

Rating: 6.0