Developer: Wazen
Publisher: NIS America, Inc.
Platform: PC,
Tested on: PC
Assault Spy – Preview
A spy who is also assaulting seems a bit contradictory, no? Yet what if his purpose is to steal and beat up some baddies while he does it? That’s the premise of Assault Spy, a game made by Wazen. Here your character sneaks to steal stuff by hacking into businesses, and when problems come at you, you are ready to fight them away from you. Assault. Spy. Assault Spy.
Assault Spy is about a guy named Asaru who is a corporate spy in the future or a different dimension. He runs past lasers and defenses, tries to sneak into prohibited areas and steals data from businesses. When he needs to fight, he sure can handle himself with a wide variation of James-Bond-like gadgets and weapons such as exploding business cards to throw or an umbrella with a very heavy impact. He soon is joined by a girl named Kanoko, who is more trouble than good for his stealth spydom.
Together they form a comical duo who at a certain mission, are confronted with an evil being eradicating an entire building that just so happened to be Asaru’s next target. In an effort to help hundreds of building employees in need, they do their best to eradicate robots that went rogue and instead of protecting people, attack them.
Visually, every part of Assault Spy is already looking pretty slick. With all the white and technological-looking surroundings, you might feel like the world around you is designed by Apple from time to time. Its rather futuristic and empty spaces don’t give the vibe of humans ever having worked there. Of course, everything is under control of security robots you battle which makes the absence of humanity even further present. The animations and characters, except for when you run (like a robot on robot-enhancing drugs), are also looking finished and ready to play with. The characters are typical anime-characters, yet well-designed.
The game’s gameplay is a lot like the Devil May Cry series. A hack and slash, where you expand your inventory with new items from time to time and buy skills for every weapon and your body spending the currency you earn by fighting and looting. The dangers you fight against do not feel a lot like such games though. There where Devil May Cry is filled with dangerous-looking fiends and other enemies in a free-to-roam type of world, Assault Spy locks every fight down like an arena to drop sluggish silly robots in your face that slowly turn and shoot something at you. As you progress, the enemies get tougher and will deliver more variations, but the core gameplay will stay the same.
Practically, you run from one arena to the other, where as soon as you arrive everything around you gets locked down and won’t go up again before you kick some silly robot butt. This way, the feeling of real eminent danger stays out, making the game more of an all-ages-allowed derivative from the Devil May Cry gameplay genre of Hack and Slash. Don’t be fooled though! Especially when you get further in the game, there is plenty of challenge to be found in certain arenas, but overall you know what to expect. It’s questionable if the areas should, in fact, stay closed or if it would be more fun if it got slightly more like DMC or Kingdom Hearts.
Besides this discussion about the gameplay, the best reason to keep playing is probably the mystery of what’s about to happen next in the story. The interaction so far is well-written and what you could expect from an anime-type of game. There are some innuendos here and there, some extreme emotional reactions, some over-the-top fights. Yes, depending on how it all comes together, it’s a curious game that’s compelling enough to get at least the attention of general anime-fans.
Conclusion
Even though the gameplay in Assault Spy still leaves some desires open for future interpretation, it already has a solid story and framework in terms of you knowing what to expect from the game. It mixes that type of hack and slash genre you don’t see in many games with typical anime story and groundwork. If you like both these things, the game might already be good for you! Else, let’s see what it has to offer on a final release.
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