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Give a man a coffee and he will drink for half an hour. Give a man 1200 coffees and he will become CFO of his own corporation. You can thank your lucky stars for Spazcon’s lax employee expectations but so goes its logic – this is an 8-bit styled iPhone game where success is measured by accumulating mugs in your four-storey office building while climbing up the rungs of the corporate ladder.
You control a man who has lost his ability to stand still. Your Entry Level slacker bounces off of all surfaces in a building that, unluckily, is made up entirely of an obstacle course of oversized office supplies. And the result is something in the way of Office Space-meets-pin ball machine, where pinging and ponging the guy across the screen is your primary tactic.
The aim is to herd him in the desired direction by drawing lines across the screen which become makeshift platforms used to prod him toward the three coffee mugs you must collect per level. The lines degrade almost instantly so keeping him from ricocheting off every nearby surface is a matter of continuously drawing and re-drawing – the origin, I would guess, of the game’s title.
Collecting all mugs in the Entry Level world opens up a new set of levels that lead you to Junior Data Clerk world and all the way to President and CFO, although later levels aren’t much more challenging than the earlier set. In fact difficulty in the game is more to do with human error than actual in-game challenges.
Often you’ll accidentally heave your office worker into the elevator – the final objective that ends each level – before you’ve collected all coffee mugs, forcing you to replay that stage. It’s how you manoeuvre around the elevator that provides the most brutal – and fun – challenge in the game but levels are rarely designed with it in mind. Instead bouncy platforms seem preoccupied with keeping you away from the pints of coffee perched just out of reach to turn the elevator into a legitimate nemesis.
Bugs don’t rear their head often, and when they do they’re rarely game enders, but it coats the game with minor frustrations. Next to random disappearances the long loading time between levels are just as confusing, and switching between menu screens often sets the game into a stand still for up to ten seconds. Similarly the soundtrack cuts out randomly in certain levels – a shame when its 8-bit audio is one of the most likeable aspects of the game.
But it’s a work in progress and the designer has already stated bug fixes and additional levels are on their way. Spazcon is a very simple game that caters to the palate of anyone with the slightest soft spot for 8-bit visuals and basic office humour. And while it doesn’t feel like an entirely finished product the combination of retro feel and in-game job promotions is enough to keep you climbing that corporate ladder.
