Sparedevil Review (PC)

Horde shooters already have a reputation for the bizarre, in various different ways. There’s little not to love about shooting huge great hordes of enemies, either with a large arsenal of weaponry as in Vampire Hunters, or sticking to just the one like the seminal Devil Daggers or Crossbow: Bloodnight. None of them are perhaps as out-there in concept, however, as Sparedevil. A recent release from this July, Sparedevil is a horde shooter themed around ten pin bowling. And as bizarre as that sounds… it’s exactly as bizarre as it sounds.

I may not be Garland, but I’ll still knock you all down!

The game doesn’t have a story or anything, which is probably for the better. It sees you armed with an endless supply of bowling balls (which can be charged by holding down the Fire button) to chuck at an endless number of pins, most of which spawn in the familiar ten-pin array, and which can be knocked down accordingly. The aim is to get the highest score you can and become the Kingpin of Hell’s Alley – or in practical terms, top the game’s leaderboard. Without a story to tie it all together, this actually ends up giving the game a lot more direction – who needs logic when you have pure unadulterated nonsense and fun?

This ain’t no Wii Sports.

As in the real game of bowling, knocking ten pins down with one shot gets you a Strike, and doing so in two shots gets you a Spare. Unlike the real game of bowling though, these pins fight back, and as you strike down more and more of them, they only get weirder and weirder as your score increases. there are “spawner” pins that resemble giant, grotesque mini-golf holes, rocket-propelled pins that chase you and mortar pins that will barrage the location around you. There’s even pin-piloted UFOs, and esoteric cameos of sorts from various pinball machine-like objects like bumpers and wheels. You can also unlock various skins for your ball by completing various challenges throughout the game, so you can bowl down those varnished villains with a little bit of extra glitter and have something else to work towards while you do. It resembles some kind of demented bowling-alley animation (apparently this is entirely the developer’s intention), and I also felt a Germfood/Haunted PS1-esque sense of unease from the game’s slightly pixelated, nostalgic aesthetic. If anything then, Sparedevil is very well-themed.

Waiting for the perfect moment to strike…

The bowling balls aren’t your only tools in dealing with the nylon-coated wooden menace, however. You can also use various special abilities in your bowling crusade – scoring Strikes gives you charges you can use to fire a precise laser at stragglers left over from spares and splits, you can jump into the air and slam-dunk the ball down onto the ground like a basketball, you can even look up and throw it upwards at flying enemies. I don’t think I could ever come up with so many uses for a humble bowling ball – and all of them are surprisingly fun to use as you’re surrounded by deadly pins, bowling, slamming, chucking and zapping your way through the endless hordes and grinning like an idiot as you do so.

Final thoughts

A bowling-themed horde shooter was not something I was expecting to encounter, yet here we are. Sparedevil forgoes such pleasantries as a story and goes all-in on its concept without being shackled by logic, surging forward in a blaze of surrealness. With all the cheese of a circa 2001 bowling alley in its visual design, and leaning into the inherent wackiness of the horde shooter genre with flair, it stands out among its genre; crazy even among crazy. And against all odds, it’s a whole lot of fun.