SphereZor

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1-5 Co-Op (Local)

.

Review:

SphereZor is an Arcade-style game released on the Wii U in 2016. In this game, players control one of various multicolored emoticon-style “smiley face” circles trying to collect a specific number of glowy purple pickups that appear in each level while avoiding enemies.

As that intro indicates, the presentation here is not at all impressive, though it is at least appealing, with the fairly simple characters and background at least having lively animation, and backed by a decent chiptune soundtrack. This game still looks a bit too amateurish for something selling for $10, but at least it’s not outright ugly.

The core gameplay here is fairly simple – this is an “avoid-’em-up”-style game where players are only using the analog stick or D-Pad to move, collecting pickups and avoiding obstacles and the game’s simplistic enemies (which only bounce vertically or horizontally, with no AI at all).As you progress through a level, these enemies grow in number, though there’s a golden pickup that allows you to bash into them to destroy them.

While the idea of a 5-player competitive game in this style seems to have potential, SphereZor bungles things in numerous ways. Firstly, there are only two game modes, and both are nearly identical – a casual mode is a standard level-based mode, while “arcade” mode is… the exact same thing, but without continues. Sadly, this game lacks any sort of endless mode where enemies continue to propagate until they overwhelm players.

The multiplayer is also extremely poorly-implemented. The game keeps score on who has gathered how many of the purple gems, much as you would have in a competitive game, but there’s no individual “winner” here, meaning this is only competitive if you make it competitive. And even so, the level progression doesn’t add together the gems collected by everyone, but simply looks to see if any one player has met the quota. In other words, you can have four players doing nothing and just avoiding enemies and the fifth player can not only complete the level for the other players just as fast as they could on their own, but if the other players try to “help”, they’ll only make things more difficult and time-consuming.

However, all of these issues would be at least somewhat forgivable if not for this game’s biggest flaw – the loading times on menu screens and between levels are absurdly long for a game this simple and visually-unimpressive. For a multiplayer Arcade-style game like this you want it to be as snappy as possible to keep things moving, and instead every time you have to change menus or whenever you complete a level, you have to wait a few seconds while the game is frozen.

How in the world is a game this lazy and poorly-constructed priced at $10? I can see ways that SphereZor could have been great multiplayer fun, but unfortunately some really terrible design choices and horrible loading times make this a tedious disappointment of a game. Don’t bother with it.

tl;dr – SphereZor is an Arcade-style game where players move around an emoticon-style face and try to collect pickups while avoiding enemies. This game has multiple terrible design decisions that mar the potential this game had as a fun multiplayer experience, and things are made worse by absolutely terrible loading times. Do yourself a favor and skip this one.

Grade: D+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Talissa, Eli Goodman, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}