Spuds Demo

Original ideas are difficult to come by in a field where everyone can do anything and get away with it, such as the video games industry. The new tools and possibilities available to developers and amateur thrill seekers are now advanced enough to make mostly everything possible, which is both exhilarating and worrying at the same time.

Spuds is a mixture of strategy and puzzle game in which you have to accomplish a deceptively simple objective: win the battles you are presented with. However, things stop being so simple when you realize that you have to do everything yourself, even if you have plenty of units at your disposal, patiently waiting for your orders.

As such, the game revolves around your ability to program a bunch of Synthetic Pattern-matching Universal Defenders, which are actually just weird-looking units devoted to dying in combat. Unlike in other strategy games, however, you have complete control over how each unit acts on the battlefield, starting with its movement patterns, all the way to the weapons it uses to damage the enemies.

This freedom of choice translates into an intricate user interface as well, on the other hand, so you might need a bit of time to get accustomed to the controls and the panels. Worry not, however, for the game  provides probably the longest tutorials out there, which explain in detail how every function works and how to approach each situation. Granted, this can get pretty annoying after a while, unless you have the necessary patience to go through all of them.

From a technical point of view, the game is not exactly state-of-the-art, but it is functional and it doesn’t look bad at all. On the other hand, there are some optimization issues plaguing it, because everything starts going downhill once the number of units on the screen goes past a certain number. Even so, most of the fun is in coming up with the solution to the puzzles and finding the perfect strategy for your troops.

All things considered, Spuds is certainly a breath of fresh air in the industry, which is always a good thing. Unfortunately, the intricate nature of the gameplay might put a lot of players off, especially since it takes a long time to learn everything there is to know just to operate the interface, let alone solve the puzzles and come out victorious.