Spellspire is an adorable little word puzzle rpg-like game, oozing charm and innocence you ascend the tower full of rotting zombies and spooky skeletons smiting them down with various wands. Undoubtedly adorable spellspire unfortunately cannot escape its own flaws.
Spellspire is as simple as it gets, with no story in sight you are thrown into the tower with a few quick tutorial flaws to teach you the mechanics of the game. You are given 10 random letters and the goal is to make a word from at least 3 letters and send it through to launch an attack at the monster ahead of you, the more letters to form a word the more powerful a spell. Monsters are on a timer that once reaches zero lunges an attack and the timer resets, the goal being to throw enough spells to drop all the monsters on the flaw before you give them a chance to bash your skull in with various spikey sticks. This is where the simplicity of Spellspire becomes its fault, monster variety means nothing more than the amount of damage they do and their health pool and that leaves you barely even looking at what dastardly creature is in front of you and instead leaves you just smashing out as many words as quickly as you can. For longer playsessions this gameplay can absolutely start to wear thin especially when you are dolled a bad set of letters and your brain has a meltdown trying to work out enough words to get out, maybe I am just bad at it and honestly I probably am, a grand majority of the words I got out were 3 letters or whatever profanity I could see first, the random letters could really feel a bit unfair at times because I actually struggled to see words sometimes. Attempting to cheat by just slamming keys and seeing if I could get words actually worked sometimes too and what came out would be things I didn’t even know were words but hey they counted.
Spellspire is neat and a little bit of fun for a short while but it really suffers from sameyness when you play it for longer than a handful of minutes, just going to each floor and trying to slam as many words out of your brain can get very boring very quickly. The game suffers horrifically from mobile game port syndrome, it is without a doubt more suited to short playsessions while you are on the toilet or waiting for something, to just pull out your phone and have a neat little puzzle for a little bit until you are ready to move on with whatever it is you are doing. And it is not just spellspire that suffers from this there are amazing games that just don’t translate well to sitting at your computer and playing for a focused hour or two. A lot of Spellspire just screams “phone game” from the oversized buttons to the timed daily rewards it’s just not the kind of thing I can bare to sit at my computer and play for very long.
There is an upgrade shop with a fairly massive slew of weapons robes and hats which can be unlocked by ascending the tower to a certain level or collecting enough stars; obtained by repeating an already completed level of the tower. Unlocked wands and robe and the like can be purchased with coins that are dropped from enemies and rewarded for beating floors.
Repeating floors and grinding for coins can feel necessary because just going up doesn’t award you enough coins to be able to keep up with monsters HP and damage regardless of how good you are at getting words which just furthered my frustrations
The art style of Spellspire is this cartoony chibi and everything is hyper cute, this adorable little wizard man marching down a corridor demolishing cute little skeletons goblins and zombies, the tower itself is just as bright and colourful although it can be as samey as the gameplay and again not that inspiring to look at for too long.
There is nothing inherently that wrong with spellspire, it is a little bit of adorable challenging word fun but it is absolutely not at home for a focused play on PC and is way more appropriate for phone or mobile play. For this reason I give spellspire a 6/10. A fun little game but played on the wrong system.