Spinny's Journey Reviews

The theming is cute and inoffensive, and the stage designs don't seem too bad - It's the controls that stop this game from being a enjoyable Kururin-inspired homage. There's such a huge amount of deadzone with the XBONE analog stick, that you need to hold the stick halfway up to get any input read at all, which makes finite adjustments neigh impossible to perform. It also took me 30 minutes to find out you could use keyboard to control this game, as there is easily HALF A SECOND of delay in your inputs being read. I have no idea what the logic was behind that. Keyboard doesn't seem to work in the menus either. I also noticed a group of glitches in the menu's where things were highlighted that weren't selected, and if you backtrack through the worlds your player icon disappears and you have to fumble your way around in the void. Hopefully the devs fix up the glaring control issues and the glitches present. As a huge Kururin fan and speedrunner of the series, I love seeing games that attempt to emulate/build upon the Kururin formula. Sadly, this game just misses the mark in its current state.

Overall, I quite enjoyed this game as one of the first true homages to Kururin around. The music and visuals are quite good on the whole, and I found the level design to be nice as well. However, I think the game is held back by some really odd gameplay issues that might not even matter to most players. For example, as I got into the later levels I noticed how hard it became to precisely move the ship since there's this odd deadzone on the analog stick (I was playing with a DS4) that doesn't read your inputs until the stick is moved about halfway from neutral. I also found that the lacking ability to speed up the ship's rotation speed (a la Kururin Paradise/Squash) was a weird omission, as there would not only be a lot of seconds you could shave off your best records with this feature, but plenty of creative technical exploits players could find. Similarly, I thought it was a bit strange that the starting point and healing zones weren't considered safe and give you penalties for trying to make any adjustments to your angles. Besides that, there were a few occasions when my collected ship parts suddenly disappeared from my save altogether as if I had never gotten them at all. This didn't seem to have any affect on my best times or no-damage runs however. And as a more minor issue, the stage select has a problem where if the mouse is left on the screen while using the keyboard or analog stick (at least I think that's the cause), the cursor gets stuck on the wrong page and mucks things up. Other than that, I found this game to be quite a good start for modern-day Kururin, although it definitely needs some work before it can be considered "excellent" or before I can really recommend it. Thankfully, the developers seem to respond to feedback quite well, so my hope is that this review is obsolete soon enough.