Spaera is an Early Access block matching game by Blazing Orb. I got this one out of a the Humble Gems bundle from October last year. It's been sitting in my to-pay queue for quite a while receiving semi regular updates.

Sadly while the game is intended to be played against other players, the # of players online was listed as '0' for the duration I played it. And the SP component does not have quite enough there to keep one playing.

Some of the initial issues are a lack of a tutorial and not so intuitive controls. In Spaera the ',' and '.' keys rotate the blocks, I honestly had to look into the settings section to find this out. 'W' quick drops and 'S' slides the blocks faster. 'A' and 'D' move left and right, as expected.

Something about this feels off though, despite growing up with the Win 3.1 port of Tetris and countless hours of Columns on the Game Gear. The controls just don't quite behave as I'd expect them to.

I did eventually get use to it and not stuff up my tower as much as I did when I started. And they can be remapped. But the default ones are just not something I was able to jump right into. This is an Early Access game.

The initial learning curve here is far steeper than it could be. You may jump right into 'Story Mode', which itself has no story. However I'd not expect much from a block-matching game more than some tacky one liners of I WILL DEAFEAT (sic) YOU!.

Presented with the traditional two panel falling grids you can see a line up of odd shaped polyforms. These are shared between the two players rather than each player grabbing them from individual sets. In full two player Vs mode, this presents an interesting meta game where you may want to dump pieces just to sabotage and grab one further down the list you know your opponent needs.

Skilled players only, filthy casuals like myself just took whatever I was presented with and found a way to work it in rather than planning several moves ahead.

The basic match-3 rules apply here. Line up 3 or more colours in a row or column to clear those pieces. The slight change Spaera uses is that blocks don't immediately hang. for example, if you have a 7 shaped block where the long side is the same colour and you sit it upright, the piece off to the side will fall several blocks before resting. This gets around some of the gaps issues found in other match-3 games and allows long chain combos if you can drop blocks correctly.

There's also wildcard bombs. They'll clear an entire row if you line them up with two or more of another colour or themselves.

I've not really played any|many games in this genre that had selectable characters since playing Bust-A-Move 3 on the Saturn. A game I still play when I have time to hook the console up to the TV.

In Spaera the character you select determines what magic powers they have and can cast during play.

By lining up glowing orbs you can gain spell power up to 4 tier levels. Each giving a different effect to you or your opponents board. Some may move rows from your side to the opponent. One removes random blocks from you opponent, and is best used when they have a lot of blocks on their screen as the games make it harder for them to produce combos. Another will force all the blocks on your screen to one side, freeing up a nice amount of space and again, allowing delicious combos.

Due to the amount of characters and each of them having 4 different abilities I really didn't have the time or patience to figure out what each one did. Really this is down to having no one to compete against with a zero player population.

It's the type of game where I enjoy local Co-Op and MP. As opposed to blasting it for being forced. Here, it is missed. The SP mode is just a bit too boring to play for more than an hour or two.

The game is honestly good. Decent graphics and sound, keys are responsive enough, and there were no crashes or bugs that presented themselves. Yeah, been playing a lot of crappy < $1 game on steam this week so having something that works was nice.

Aside from the initial difficulty in getting to know how it works there's no real issue here. It just needs more people playing or perhaps a console release where the couch gameplay style is more suited to it.

Game Acquisition: Humble Gems Bundle (October 2016).
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 20 April 2017
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows 7, 8, or 10
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E7300
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Graphics: Intel Integrated HD 4000
Sound Card: DirectX compatible soundcard or onboard chipset