Assault Spy

I went into Assault Spy expecting a competent-enough indie brawler with spy window-dressing. What I did not expect was a combat system so satisfying that the game's real flaws - and there are real flaws - feel almost beside the point. This was built by a single developer at Wazen, and that context colors everything you see, good and bad. The core of the game is a character-action brawler in the vein of Devil May Cry: you read enemy patterns, string together combos from punch, kick, dash, charge, and projectile inputs, and get graded on your performance afterward. Asaru fights with a briefcase and throwable business cards styled as shurikens, which is exactly as absurd and precise-feeling as it sounds. Amelia, the second playable protagonist, trades the briefcase for a more aggressive gun-and-fist style that rewards dashing into chains of aerial strikes. Each character runs through a campaign of roughly five to six hours, and since those two stories interweave and recontextualize each other, the actual content count is longer than the runtime implies. Clearing normal unlocks harder difficulty tiers that reshuffle enemy layouts and reduce how many hits you can absorb, and a fifty-floor survival mode called Spy Must Die pushes the combat into pure endurance territory. Move upgrades are purchased from mid-level kiosks, and because you cannot afford everything in a single run, repeat playthroughs have a genuine pull. The characters are the warmest surprise. Asaru is a hapless straight-man spy perpetually undone by his chaotic partner Kanoko, and Amelia is a loud, cheerfully reckless CIA agent who treats every obstacle as an opportunity to punch something. The story is thin as paper and knows it. Most of the charm lives in the visual-novel-style dialogue portraits, which are illustrated with real personality and hold up well against any rough edges in the 3D environments. The voice acting, in Japanese, matches the anime-comedy energy consistently. Now, the honest part: the camera is unreliable in tighter spaces, the level layouts are repetitive corridors that exist mostly to ferry you between fight arenas, and there is a stealth section embedded in each campaign that players have loudly and correctly identified as completely out of place in a game this good at fast combat. It stalls momentum at exactly the wrong moment. The 3D animations during non-combat scenes can feel unfinished, and special moves are not clearly documented, so you will spend early hours unsure whether you are playing poorly or simply missing inputs. Playing with a controller rather than keyboard and mouse is not a soft recommendation - it is genuinely the intended way to play. For anyone who has ever wished a smaller studio would take a real swing at the spectacle-fighter genre without hiding behind budget ambitions, Assault Spy lands that swing more often than not. Its Steam community has kept a warm reception across years of play, which for a game this niche says something real. The rough edges are visible, but the thing underneath them has craft and speed and a lot of heart.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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