I was flipping through my documents and found this old review I wrote in March of last year. I never posted it anywhere online, so I figured I’d post it here!
Spoiler Alert brings you to a time reversing universe. You play as a chili pepper knight, beginning on level 3-30, fighting the boss, then playing all levels in reverse. It’s a pretty neat idea, honestly!
However, the execution is poor.
The levels begin (or end, rather) simply. Level 3-29 starts off with one enemy, and two sets of coins you must reach. Being the second to last level, you would expect it to throw at you all it has. Now, I understand that games start off easy, to teach you mechanics and how to play the game in general. But Spoiler Alert is advertised as “a game you play backwards.” Being as such, it was disappointing to say the least that it ends up just being an endless runner game where you go left instead of right.
Putting that aside, Spoiler Alert has an even bigger problem than its simplicity.
A lot of levels flat out don’t make sense.
So, in order to progress, you have to jump on dead enemies to bring them back to life as well as collect coins the pepper received when he first played the level.
Pictured below is the end of a level in World 2. The coin at the beginning was never gotten by the pepper, so you have to jump over it. This doesn’t make sense. Since the level “begins” there, he would naturally obtain it, unless he was purposely avoiding it (which, again, doesn’t make sense.)
You might think this is an isolated example, but it isn’t. Here are some more examples.
Level 1-30, where you have to put in effort to avoid the coins a boss throws at you.
Level 1-20, where you have to get this coin in order to finish the level. It would be impossible for the pepper to retrieve this going forward.
Level 1-3. The level that made me even want to write this review. These spikes are at the beginning of the level. The pepper spawns at the very edge of the levels, because this is an infinite runner game (not to mention that the spikes have huge hitboxes.) If he were to play this left to right, he would die instantly.
Another minor annoyance is the fact that when going for gold, the only way to fully retry a level is to either complete it, or restart from the main menu. Getting gold on every level means to beat them without dying, so it’s irritating when you’re going through ninety levels to have to complete or go all the way back to the main menu to try again.
All in all, my main problem was with the lack of charm. It could have very easily been a charming little game, if they had put some more effort into making the levels seem real. As it is, Spoiler Alert remains as a generic infinite runner game.
Bishounen-P 