Day Two: Assault Spy
If Dante was an accountant
Holiday Spyce
Ninjas are pretty cool. They can sneak, fight and according to videogames, they can even do magic. That’s pretty rad. What if you were to take a ninja, and give him a nine to five office gig? Would he still be cool?
If Assault Spy is anything to go by, yes, he’d still be extremely cool.
Read on to find out why Assault Spy is a short game with worse graphics (made by people paid more to work less) that you should definitely try out!
What is it?
Assault Spy is a spectacle fighter/character action game where you play as a spy who goes around beating up robots. It has all the things you know and love from the genre: combos, style ratings, complicated techniques and a lot of flash.
You have three attacks, a dash and some contextual moves. There’s the regular light attack which is used for combos, a heavy attack with the briefcase which ends combos or launches enemies, and even heavier attacks with an umbrella you can use as a katana. The combo list is kept relative short, at least when compared to the ones you’d see in Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, but the number of options you have available at all times makes up for it.
Asaru, the main character, plays like Dante from Devil May Cry, if he had all his styles on at once. Not like he does in DMC4 and 5, where he switches between them. Here you can dash and teleport dash as if you had Trickster, attack with charged ranged attacks like with Gunslinger and even use some ranged slashes like Vergil. You always have a tool for every situation, and they’re a ton of fun to use.
To make things a bit more fun and technical, there are the perfect attacks. If you press a button in a combo when Asaru flashes white, you do a perfect attack, which imbues the next move with more damage and special properties. It’s satisfying to pull off. My favorite is the heavy dash attack, which, if timed correctly, does a massive palm strike, but if you charge the perfect palm strike for the right amount of time, you get a sort of double-perfect finishing move that can devastate anything.
If you get tired of playing as the titular spy guy, fear not, for you get the chance to play as a completely new character, Amelia, around halfway through the game. She has a different moveset with a lot of attacks and a resource system that charges up and lets her add more power to her attacks.
All these moves flow into each other intuitively, and there are a lot of subtle nuances to learn. It has a high skill ceiling, while keeping an accessibly low skill floor. It’s fast-paced, responsive and a ton of fun. You can play it at your own leisure on normal, or go for a challenge on the higher difficulties trying to get a higher rank. Either way, it’s a great time.
If you get good at it, you can even do stuff like this:
Short
Even with two characters, a playthrough of the story will take you around 6 hours. That’s if you get through it at a regular pace without retrying sections. It has a lot of replay value, too, with its multiple difficulties, ranking and interesting combat. I found myself replaying stages for fun and a better rank.
Worse Graphics
The game was made by one guy, and it shows, for better or worse. The character models are nice, and the designs are appealing. Asaru’s suit looks nice, he has a clean, recognizeable silhouette, all his attacks look neat and the way they re purpose office gear into ninja/spy gadgets is creative. It’s a shame that the game looks kind of dull.
The game takes place in a massive office building, and the overall style is supposed to be like a boring, corporate wasteland, but it gets the job done a bit too well. Everything is either black or gray, or blinding white lit by overhead fluorescent bulbs. The interior design is so gray and minimalist that even the most joyless millennial house would look like a McDonald’s playground in comparison.
The graphics’ low budget is also reflected on the models themselves. They look kind of plasticky and untextured, like action figures.
Even with all that, the game’s art direction manages to combine these elements into something coherent. Some areas are so barren and lifeless, that they loop back around to being artfully abstract.
The game’s clean aesthetics and good use of special effects keeps the game from looking too boring. There are a lot of particle effects, cool animations and robots exploding to keep your attention, even if you’re fighting in an office in purgatory.
The music is good, at least. A lot of loud, high-energy electronic music that will get you pumped to steal some corporate secrets.
Made by People Paid More To Work Less
As mentioned in the graphics, this was done by one guy, who goes by the pseudonym Wazen. It was published by Nippon Ichi Software America, the ones who distribute the Disgaea series, the Trails series (not to be confused with the Tales of… series), and a bunch of other relatively niche games for weebs.
There isn’t much online, but he’s a former Capcom employee, who worked on Devil May Cry. If he left that to pursue a career developing his own games by himself, there must be something to it. As of writing this, he’s working on another game, MIGHTREYA, which he is developing on his own, too. For that game, he mentioned he got some funding from his publisher, and he does most of the work, but hires other independent artists for help on some things.
If he quit a stable job to go on his own and make games, I think it’s because it’s worth it for him. He takes his time making the games, so I think this counts as made by someone who is paid more to work less. At least the full control of the creative vision makes up for it, if the salary is a little low.
Conclusion
Assault Spy is a game you should definitely play. It has all the technique, flashyness and fun of a Devil May Cry game in a much smaller package made by just one guy (and whomever else helped with the art and such). It has a good, solid core gameplay loop, it makes good use of its limited assets by having a small group of very different enemies, it’s short and to the point, and it packs a lot of ideas into its runtime.
You can grab Assault Spy for $20. At the time of writing this, it’s on sale for $4 until January 3 2026, and I definitely think it’s worth a purchase, even at full price.
Read Yesterday’s article on KILLKNIGHT if you want more low-budget action.