Spelunker HD Review — It’s Spelunker … in HD … That’s It.
Spelunker … wow. Do any of you even remember Spelunker? I do, because it was one of those strange games for the NES that I got from a relative one Christmas who had no concept of what video games were, or which ones were good. That’s not to say Spelunker was bad. It was just unfathomably frustrating. There were so many way to die, you rarely knew where you were going, and the jumping controls weren’t the best, which was murder in a game that was essentially a platformer. Nevertheless I spent far too much time playing Spelunker in the days of my youth, and I never expected the game to be brought back in the HD era. Perhaps it is slightly poetic that I got my first taste of Spelunker as a Christmas present, and now Spelunker HD is coming out just in time for the holiday season.
Spelunker HD is certainly not guilty of false advertising. It’s basically Spelunker, and it is in HD. However, more than just the graphics get an overhaul this time around. The levels and maps are totally redone, and new multiplayer modes make the game a treat to play with friends. It’s a Spelunker for a new generation, and if you are looking for that sort of thing, there is very little it does wrong.
The game features 100 levels, with 10 levels each spanning a new type of cave environment. Your goal is to find the keys and the exit without dying, and that’s easier said than done. You don’t have a health meter, but one hit from anything does you in. You have an air meter at the top of the screen that gradually depletes but refills are plentiful, as are extra lives, so while the game is difficult it never feels unfair. You can also collect bombs and flares to help defend yourself against cave baddies, and while these are slightly less plentiful, they are plenty powerful.
Everything wants to kill you, and I mean everything. You’ll contend with hidden traps, snakes, fire streams, rolling boulder, ghosts, and … goddamn I can’t even remember it all! Unlike the NES version, the environments in Spelunker HD are more interactive, so the ways in which you die are many and varied. For example, you may be riding on a mine cart only to find that one section of the track crumbles when you are on it. However, if you try to avoid, you end up running into a steam vent or causing a cave in or something. On one level you’ll have to ride moving platforms atop streams of water, but random cave floods can also drown you. It feels a lot less like the “copy paste a trap/enemy” here gameplay of the NES version, and a lot more like a modern day puzzle platformer.
Nevertheless I cannot stress how much you are going to die in this game, and that’s kind of the point. Spelunker can use some of his air to power a fan attack that works on ghosts, but then you bring yourself closer to suffocation. If you fall any sort of distance, Spelunker dies horribly. Hell, if you trip into a shallow pit, Spelunker dies horribly. You have to make every jump with purpose, even when going downward. You can’t fall off a ledge expecting to survive even the most trivial of drops.
Luckily, there are spawn points everywhere. Pick up an item, and it’s essentially a spawn point. Every ten levels greet you with another checkpoint that you can start from even when you lose all your lives. To further aid you, the game lets you look around the screen at areas you haven’t been too yet, and plots your progress on a mini-map so you don’t get lost. The fact that there is a strange transition effect when you hit the center of the map is a little disorienting but it’s nothing to complain about.
Online multiplayer is basically what you think it would be. It’s Spelunker, except the levels are bigger and you can play with up to five other people. You get to see all your friends screens along with your own, and you get to see their locations on the mini-map, and working together will allow you to defeat many cave challenges that wouldn’t have been possible alone. There is also a competitive race mode but that’s only for the die-hard speed runners. Since Spelunker is more of a puzzle platformer, it’s more fun to take your time and figure out the more efficient route than to rush through a stage while hoping not to die.
I’d say that the online multiplayer is one of the best parts of Spelunker HD, but there just isn’t a community to support it. It takes forever to find an online game if you can find a group at all, and forget about finding anyone to play in a competitive game against you. You can play offline, but the split screen makes in-game elements a little too small. Add to that the fact that offline games are limited to 4 players and there isn’t any online/offline hybrid co-op play, and it starts to feel like the game’s multiplayer suite is lacking in areas that could have been improved.
The graphics in the game aren’t t all that astounding. It’s a downloadable game, but I’ve seen better looking downloadble titles in the past. Luckily enough the game has a retro mode that portrays everything in glorious eight bit graphics. The stages, controls, and game mechanics don’t change; it’s just that everything is made out of frames of pixilated art rather than polygons. If you ask me, retro mode is easier too. It’s just easier to see where the collision boxes are on a 2D sprite rather than a 3D model.
The sound is boring and repetitive, which doesn’t work very well when you listen to its updated techno soundtrack. However, once again switching the game to retro mode saves the day. The repetitive soundtrack feels right at home when it’s played through an eight bit synth. It effectively turns something annoying to something nostalgic with nothing more than an option toggle.
Spelunker HD is a game that is purposefully designed to be frustrating, and as such its main appeal is to the difficulty junkies out there. It actually appeals to a very specific subset of difficulty junkies that enjoy classic games that are “NES Hard.” Casual gamers will find Spelunker’s inability to fall more than a few feet exceedingly frustrating, while nostalgia buffs will remember this as a throwback to the early days of game design. What I’m trying to say is that the market for Spelunker HD is very small. This isn’t the sort of game you buy on a whim. This is the sort of game that you buy because you remember how much you liked the difficulty of the original NES game.
In not so many words, Spelunker HD pleases Spelunker fans, and not really anyone else. That doesn’t make it a bad game, it just means it’s a game in a pigeon holed genre. If you are the kind of retro game difficulty addict that the game is looking to please, then you will love Spelunker HD. Otherwise, you should probably give the game a pass.
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
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