Being a Wii game, the controls are typically unusual. What would be a simple task for a joypad now requires an extra finger on your left hand for the nunchuk controls, which make use of all the buttons along with the thumbstick for movement. It’s not so much the movement that’s the issue, but the fighting combos that install double joints in your knuckles after an hour’s play.

Light and heavy attack buttons are fine and, although it descends into button mashing pretty quickly, that’s surprisingly tolerable. But moving while button mashing isn’t what the human hand was designed for (hmm, so I guess Nintendo isn’t god after all), and performing co-ordinated attacks simply isn’t worth the effort.

Another trap the developer has fallen into (though they’d probably cop a fair amount of flack if they hadn’t fallen into it, too) is making arbitrary use of the Wii-mote. Some dreadful ‘spy vision’ system is required to pick out hidden objects within the scenery, which not only doesn’t match the rest of Spyborg’s reasonably intensive fighting gameplay, but doesn’t work very well in its own right, either.

After the devs had painted themselves into that particular corner, things got really bad as they rolled out the quick time events. Admittedly, these are better than most examples of this awful gameplay trend, as it’s gesture based rather than button sequences, but it’s still a cheap tactic for wresting control of the characters from players just so the game can look a bit cinematic and cool.

Evidence that this game potentially began life as a classic arcade brawler is the two player function, which allows for drop-in, drop-out multiplayer, or by assigning you a reasonably intelligent A.I. cohort. Like all good beat-‘em-ups, this is a game that really comes to life when you’re bashing elbows with a fellow pugilist, and brief moments of nostalgia for those glorious arcade days can be felt between awkward punches and clumsy gesticulating at the screen.

It is nice to see the Wii being put to slightly more rigorous graphical use, though. The animation and amount of onscreen action is about as demanding as I’ve seen on Nintendo’s underpowered platform, though the pseudo-futuristic level designs could have used an extra lick of imagination paint.

Personally, I’d have been much happier with a streamlined version of Spyborgs, that made a bold effort to shed all the nonsense and child-friendly interference and just got down to the raw fighting gratuity bubbling beneath its gaudy veneer. As it is, pandering to kids has spoiled what could be a classy, if forgettable, arcade experience and turned it into an anaemic after school special.

But if you’re concerned about the quality of the digital violence your kids ingest, then Spyborgs is a pretty decent compromise. I guess.

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