Grade: B+
Ingenious light-weight puzzle platformer
Speer is a 2D puzzle platformer game with 100 levels split over four worlds. Each level is a single screen, and you must get from your launch point to the teleporter at the end.
What the main character can do is relatively simple. You have a spear and can jump to help you on your way. Your spear can be hurled and gets stuck into any non-metal wall. This gives you a temporary platform to help you get around.
Each level and world adds complexity.
As you go through the levels, there’s a whole pile of new mechanics thrown at you. The character’s abilities don’t change, but there’s a lot more you can interact with in the environment.
A few samples of new mechanics that get thrown in
- Buttons you can press that turn on/off platforming blocks of the same color
- Trampolines you can pick up and move to strategic locations
- Explosive mines you can drag and hit with your spear to blow up walls
- Teleport nodes you can hurl your spear through to interact with far away object
- Balloons that carry objects where you have to pop them at the right time
Here’s a quick video of the end of the second world vs. a video of the first world. It gets a bit nuts.
Game Review Summary
The first 30-40 levels are rapid in Speer, but after that, it slows down and becomes a set of very challenging puzzles. The new mechanics are ingenious, and it’s a neat game design trick to keep the character’s abilities consistent and straightforward. In contrast, the world around the character becomes ever more complex.
My only beef is that the reset in the later levels is brutal. You have to go back to the beginning if you make a mistake. When the levels get more complex and multi-step, that can become frustrating to get through 5 steps only to die on the 6th and final before the end. This might be part of the charm of this genre for some, but for me, it was frustrating.
Overall, Speer is a well-crafted puzzle platformer and does well for what it is. It’s worth a playthrough.
Want to see more? Explore all itch.io bundle for racial justice and equality game reviews.