REVIEW: ‘Sparklite’ Is an Epic Pixelated Adventure (Xbox One)

Sparklite is an action-adventure game published by Merge Games Ltd and developed by Red Blue Games. Upon pressing the start button and beginning my adventure, I immediately felt The Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening vibes. In it, you play as a young girl named Ada, a mechanic, who crashlands in the ever-changing land of Geordia. Georgia is a world that is being taken over and corrupted by baddies known as Titans, who belong to the mining industry. Their devious plan is to collect and harness the power of sparklite, the essence that keeps the land of Geordia together.

Players traverse the land of Geordia in top-down action equipped with your trusty wrench and hammer, collecting sparklite and weapon schematics to reverse engineer them for personal use. Aboard a giant airship, you have all you need to prepare yourself for the dangers of Geordia. There’s a medbay where you return to when you fall in battle, a Multi-Tool Enhancement machine to change your passive abilities, a widget shop, and a workshop.

Your passive skills are known as patches, in which you can create any combination of a loadout via a three-by-three grid. This is a feature I enjoyed a lot. You can truly customize your playstyle by giving yourself more life, more damage or allowing you to view the map since each time you come back to venture into the area, it looks different, and objectives are in different places. In order to change your loadout, you need to use the Multi-Tool Enhancement machine in the medbay on the airship.

Though my playthroughs, I often changed my loadout depending on the situation. Because the world changes every time you return, you never know where the boss or vault is to acquire new schematics. Sometimes when hunting for these places, there are unavoidable enemies, so I had to equip more life and damage. Once I could learn the movements and attacks of my enemies, on returning to the medbay when I died, I would equip my map of the area or the Titan locator. Adapting is crucial to your playthroughs.

In order to use the workshop after unlocking it, you have to find blueprints scattered throughout the world. Blueprints are found in mini-dungeons known as vaults. Once you find one on the map, you enter by unlocking the doorway with your mysterious necklace. Blueprints are only found in vaults. However, patches and sub-items can be found throughout the world and vaults. Upon entering the vault, you are presented with a specific weapon and a puzzle.

This small challenge allows you to play with the weapon to give you a sense of what the weapon can do and how it feels. If you can figure out the puzzle, the schematic is yours. Some of these challenges were quite frustrating but straightforward nonetheless. However, just because you unlocked the schematic doesn’t mean you can immediately use the weapon. You must upgrade your workshop to be able to craft multiple schematics and then craft said item, which all requires sparklite.

From your wrench, hammer, passive skills, secondary weapons, and sub-items, you have quite an eclectic arsenal at your disposal. You play the game in a top-down fashion moving from area to area, where the scene slides similar to that in The Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening. Although a wide variety of weapons, you don’t have an unlimited supply of sub-items, which can range from potions to explosives. As for your sub-weapons, they require energy to use. But don’t worry, a few good whacks with your wrench and bop of your hammer and you can reacquire your energy. Combat is pretty straight forward and there are no flashy special attacks or ultimates to activate but with whatever loadout of passives, items, and weapons you can muster, taking down your enemies whether minions or boss will be extremely satisfying.

Another aspect of Sparklite I enjoyed were the boss battles. As long as you can survive the world of Geordia and finding the Titans lair, you can face them right away. And if you’ve lost life along the way, you can whack open crates to grab a few hearts. From the start of the game you have three hearts. Have no fear, you will find many patches, allowing you to increase your life. In my time playing, I only found quarter hearts, so I was only able to increase my life by one heart. Unfortunately, that means four slots out of nine was taken up in my loadout. Enter the next room and low and behold is your opponent.

I had quite some trouble with the first boss. After a few tries, I was able to get his movements down and devise a plan to take the boss down. The game has an autosave system so whatever patches I found along the way, I was able to keep. Unfortunately, if I found sub-items like potions and explosives, I lost those on the way back to the medbay. There seems to be a total of four Titans you have to engage fisticuffs with and then you can take on the Baron, leader of the Titans.

Sparklite is an awesome pixelated adventure for fans of Link’s Awakening or those of the top-down genre. With its soothing and upbeat tunes, this is an amazing game to vibe out to with a dash of challenges. With the ever-changing environment and different enemies in each area, it’s hard to get bored.

Sparklite will be available for PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 now.