Go Series: Dark Spirits (Nintendo DS) Review

It should not be expected that a game priced so low should be challenging to engage with. Set against simple plain backgrounds and with little to no motivation from a narrative perspective, the idea behind Dark Spirits, the side-scrolling shoot ‘em up from Suzak, is about as demanding as the button presses it takes to get going. There is no application of the stylus here, which for some will be a refreshing change.

You fly across the screen as a caped - possibly winged - humanoid. At this point I really want to say ‘vampire’, but I don’t know if that is me talking or the highly popularised films and books currently saturating the media with nocturnal visitors. Though vampires never had the need for projectiles to fight off numerous foes. I shouldn’t even be saying ‘projectiles’, because the four circles of fire that precede you on screen are more ‘spirits’ than methods of firing out death. What you can probably already figure out from the Go Series is that it is all pretty simple, but it is within these simple constraints that developers often feel more empowered to initiate different arrangements of play.

The four spirits that follow you during your time on screen and provide your much needed firepower are by no means static, but by a tap of a button are interchangeable in their positions. A concentrated fire burst can be changed to a wide angle assault and this can all be switched again to fire in reverse and attack any advances coming from the left of the screen. Tactically, Dark Spirits is quite well designed. Enemies are reasonably varied, enough to force you to make use of all positions of your spiritual companions. The area you are attacked from is constantly in flux, and even though the button mashing never really stops your thumb will be glad of the changing pace.

Those who will feel the force of your newfound glee for projectile formations will also helpfully provide you with more ways of altering how it is you’ll actually fight. On the odd occasion the evil floating bullet spitters will drop ‘souls’, one of four different varieties. Represented by different colours, each can alter one of your spirits to perform a different task. The more souls you pick up, the more of your spirits are converted and so strategy once again plays into your hands, giving it an RPG element. For those people who want shields floating by them one minute and then strong short range attacks the next, or even both at once, you can do that. Again, in terms of strategy it is a premise that works well and is engaging, though once you pick up a soul you are stuck with it which means sometimes you are jammed with a set of converted spirits that can lead you into more trouble than solutions.

There is no lack of options, then, when it comes to making your way across the level, but wielding such a relatively large protagonist across such a small field of play makes understanding where the ‘hit box’ is the greatest difficulty. Sometimes enemy bullets sail through you and others hit where others passed unnoticed. It is an unwanted inconsistency just for the basis of having a human avatar on the screen. It is this inconsistency that seems to plague Dark Spirits from the beginning. What seems easy at first will leave you deluged in feverish fury the next and what seems like simple gameplay changes can sometimes leave you with more issues than it is worth.