Spirit Roots [Xbox]

Fireart Games’ Spirit Roots is a classic 2D platformer where you will travel across five different environments, with a total of 50 levels for you to get through. You’ll take on the role of a young boy, who has been separated from his family after the calamity caused the destruction of worlds. In order to keep these worlds alive they were joined and made into a ‘Stitched-Together Planet’, but with an agreement that no-one must cross the borders. But when his family is on the other side of that border, he must cross - and discover just what happens when someone breaks the rule.

Completing levels relies on meeting a few objectives: killing all enemies, and collecting all ‘souls’ - in the form of little floating flames - throughout the levels. Frustratingly though, your character is extremely squishy, so even the slightest touch from an enemy will kill you, sending you right back to the last checkpoint you passed. You only have three lives so reaching a game over will no doubt happen quickly, as the controls are awkwardly floaty, but yet you also grab onto ledges even when not intending to, and inadvertently bump into enemies when trying to attack.

With kids’ storybook styled visuals, it’s really joyful to look at. The different worlds all have their own appearance, with areas ranging from sandy deserts, to snowy areas, although they all have a similar vibe with the overall layouts and platforms remaining consistent. Enemy designs evolve over the course of the game, with little farmers that will toss their pitchforks at you to begin with, and moving on to strange skeletal bugs and more. Boss designs are interesting and well matched to the theme of their relevant areas, with one being available in each of the worlds. There are also various foreground elements obscuring part of the screen, and these add a good bit of depth to the environments. The soundtrack is pleasant enough, but does begin to grate on you a bit after playing for a while.

The controls are sometimes quite frustrating, as trying to make your way up through tight spaces whilst avoiding traps and hazards can be mind-blowingly punishing, as you have a fairly floaty jump, but need to have quite precise timing to avoid danger. As mentioned, there are checkpoints throughout levels, but you’ll find that some of these end up being miles and miles before the actual trouble, causing you to have to replay huge sections when you inevitably die. There are different difficulty modes available, which allows you to make things a little easier, or even remove checkpoints entirely - requiring you to play the full level perfectly, and this is absolutely infuriating when combined with the awkward platforming and sometimes skewed hitboxes.

At the end of each level, you get a little checklist that will tick off anything you’ve achieved, from defeating all enemies to collecting all coins (confusingly this refers to the souls, but somehow has changed what it wants to call them from the intro!). This makes things a lot easier to keep track of if you’re going for 100% completion! It only takes a few short hours to complete, particularly if playing on the easier difficulties.

Overall, it’s a very cutesy platformer that we love the look of, but both found to be unbelievably frustrating at parts, with the controls often being to blame for repeated deaths. Available for £5.79 on the Xbox Store, Spirit Roots is a budget friendly title, but the frustrating controls really take away from the experience.

In the end, we decided to give Spirit Roots the Collecting Asylum rating of 6/10.

Are you interested in Spirit Roots? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to Drageus Games for the Spirit Roots Xbox review code!