Sometimes a game's appeal is immediately apparent from a single GIF. Maybe it's a goose terrorizing a small town, or a surprisingly slick set of menus. I knew I wanted to play Spine the second I saw a looping clip of a character methodically kicking, grappling, and shooting a room full of hired muscle with immaculate speed, power, and precision.
Spine aims to recreate the feeling of being inside your very own "gun-fu" movie, tapping into the popularity of John Wick. I spoke to Game Director Dmitry Pimenov while playing a hands-on demo at this year's Summer Game Fest, and he told me the focus on playable gun-fu came about from a desire to showcase developer Nekki's animation chops.
Pimenov says the team watched an action movie about once per week since they started development, name-dropping everything from John Wick and John Woo movies to The Raid, Equilibrium, and Bullet Train. Heck, even Charlie's Angels. And that's not counting games inspiration, as Pimenov cites and Bungie's Oni. But that's all research.
In practice, Spine plays like most third-person action games do in a post-Batman: Arkham world. The protagonist, a street artist named Redline, is on the run with her robotic combat implant Spine. There are [[link]] hints of a broader story, incorporating VR headsets and oppressive AI in a cruel cyberpunk world, but most of what I play is an action-packed scramble through marketplaces, streets, and alleyways.
There is a basic hand-to-hand option, resulting in punches and kicks, as well as a guard break for enemies who like to keep their hands up, and a counter to spin [[link]] their momentum back around onto them. Redline also has guns, though. A pistol is your mainstay, but in the heat of a fight you can pick up a second pistol or shotgun and your moves will be dramatically altered.
While using a pistol, my shots were clean and precise little pops that I could rattle off, a couple at a time. But the shotgun had a wide, powerful cone of impact, sending enemies flying backwards. Once the shotty was empty, I'd ditch it and switch back.
When enemies surrounded me and the tension ramped up, Spine felt like a flow state John Wick simulator. I was cartwheeling over bad guys and then hitting the takedown button to pop them twice in the head, then sprinting to a pillar for cover and popping back out to return fire. Spine's combat moves at a fast pace, and with guns in the mix, it can seem a little overwhelming.
But the tension falls away fast as you master the moves, maneuver well, and start to tear apart a room of poor, doomed henchmen.
"This gives you the splashes of, you know, feeling a little bit overpowered," Pimenov says. "That's very important. It's your playground. It's a singleplayer game, you have to feel overpowered at some times, so that's our design goal here."
It's not all straightforward, either. The slice of Spine I saw changed up the action fairly often. In my first "scene," I was brawling in a bar, and more dudes cascaded in from the entryways as I cleared out their pals. Another section killed the lights, putting a dark filter over the action. In my favorite part, the camera swings up in what feels like an homage to ; which is, itself, .
It's fitting that Spine feels like a celebration of both action movies, and how action games have been inspired by action movies. When it flows and hums along, it works incredibly well, making you feel like you're piloting a gun-fu master through your own fight choreography.
The build I played, however, was fairly early, and the team warned me of a few technical wrinkles and hiccups going in. It wasn't a concerning level of roughness; rather, the sort of still-in-development hitches you'd expect when playing something that's still a [[link]] ways away, as Spine is aiming for an .
Hopefully Nekki can fine-tune those aspects in the coming months, because the foundation laid out here is rock-solid. Spine's got a lot of love for the cinematic blockbuster action flick, and the games that try to elicit those same feelings. In its best moments, Spine nails the one-against-all brawl scene, with all the tumbling, scrappy energy of a great gun-fu fight. I'd love to see it stick the landing.