Spinfrog: All Aboard the Frogcopter

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Spinfrog, released in 2022 on Nintendo Switch, is a family-friendly Arcade style game where players must pilot the titular frogcopter through various routes while avoiding touching anything with the machine’s slowly-spinning blades. If you’ve ever played any games in the Kururin series or the Irritating Stick series, you have an idea what this plays like – move the spinning stick through the maze without touching anything.

To its credit, the game’s frog theme adds a lot here, giving the game a wonderful storybook vibe that fits with its lovely presentation, which uses simple 3D with low-resolution textures that seem a bit reminiscent of the original PlayStation’s visuals, backed by laid back acoustic music that works well with those themes and lefts players focus on the challenging gameplay.

When it comes to that gameplay, Spinfrog isn’t really revolutionizing this style of game. You can speed up or slow down your spinning, but apart from that it’s pretty straightforward. There is one issue I would point to here, though – the levels are too short. It feels like you’re playing for less than a minute at a time before you have the level give you a rundown of how you did and give you the next snippet of conversation, along with loading times between everything, which really drags down the pacing to the point where it feels like you spend more time outside of gameplay than in it.

In the end, Spinfrog’s lovely presentation helps a lot, and the core gameplay is good, but this game parcels out that gameplay between so much non-gameplay fluff that it wrecks the pacing. More patient players may still find this enjoyable, but most players will find themselves wishing the gameplay could have been more streamlined here.

tl;dr – Spinfrog is an Arcade-style game where players try to navigate a spinning machine through narrow passageways without bumping into anything, much like the Kururin series and Irritating Stick. The presentation here is lovely and the core gameplay is decent, but everything drags out with far too much stuff padding between the short levels, making for terrible pacing. Patient players may still enjoy this, but I think everyone else will likely find themselves frustrated by it.

Grade: C+

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