Phoenix Spirit is an unusual title that sports a lush visual style throughout its sprawling map. You play as a silvery squirrel that is on a mission to heal the earth from a deadly virus. Huge swathes of the virus have turned plants toxic and left areas virtually impassable which makes the exploratory gameplay more compelling. As you wander through the environment you gain new abilities, such as a cleansing skill that fires a projectile at the creeps. Enemies take a couple of forms; two types of fish that swim around lazily trying to catch you and plants that fire toxins at you. Fish have a nasty habit of going through walls to get to you.

There’s a few more hazards too; stone barriers, vines blocking passageways, wind tunnels and of course the virus itself. As you gain the aforementioned abilities you can overcome these barriers and open up new parts of the map; the downside to this is that there is a lot of backtracking and the map is insufficient as you can’t have it superimposed on the screen whilst you’re navigating the dark surroundings. We think a map like in Solomon’s Keep would have been a much better idea especially as the game world is so large; indeed, the whole world looks the same and there are no larger set pieces to indicate to you that you are in a different area.

In addition to the problematic map, we think the game’s interface does let it down. It doesn’t look like it was designed for the small screen, with tiny buttons and accelerometer control that can grate if you're enjoying a longer session. To that end we also think that a left hand analog stick based control scheme would have made a better alternative; making it easy to try out the two would have been better than this control scheme. Even though you can calibrate it we feel that you don't get enough control over your avatar, especially as you are constantly losing speed and have to dive to build up more. This can be a little annoying in the small, enclosed passages that are dotted around the world; happily you can land and then utilise your position to act as a turret, shooting down the enemies. Plus, some of the text labels are blurry and not as sharp as they should be.

Because of the control scheme we couldn’t find ourselves playing Phoenix Spirit for longer sessions as it requires you to be hunched over your device most of the time. With the black walls and dark navy backgrounds it’s also difficult to see exactly where you’re going at times unless you’re playing in a darkened room; the contrast is not clear enough. Furthermore, you get tired of trawling the same environment—not that it’s ugly by any means, but it is repetitive. You get the same half a dozen obstacles, the same checkpoints and the same enemies everywhere you go. In addition, you get the same piano soundtrack that is on a fairly short loop; therefore it’s best to play your own.

What is predominantly lacking in Phoenix Spirit is a sense of a real environment; despite an attempt to appear organic, levels look like they were designed with large square brushes and copied and pasted multiple times. This would be fine if the game world was a bit smaller or had a variety of different enemies, but as it is it doesn’t feel right; an adventure game shouldn’t have a permanent sense of déjà vu. Mostly the game would just benefit from a better control scheme; we hope to see this included in an update. As it stands Phoenix Spirit is still good; it just isn’t quite there yet.

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