{"id":19678,"date":"2019-12-04T00:01:44","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T00:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=19678"},"modified":"2019-11-27T03:13:34","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T03:13:34","slug":"sparklite-ps4-switch-xbox-one-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/04\/sparklite-ps4-switch-xbox-one-pc\/","title":{"rendered":"Sparklite (PS4, Switch, Xbox One, PC)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The land of Geodia is powered by Sparklite, but when an evil Baron starts mining it to keep all for himself, the land fights back with tremors that change the environment to hinder his mining.\u00a0 But to stop the mining for good, a plucky young mechanic named Ada will save the day.\u00a0 Armed with her shapeshifting wrench, she\u2019ll use Sparklite to invent gadgets and gizmos to help her progress in this top-down Zelda style adventure.\u00a0 It\u2019s available to download on all current consoles and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.<\/p>\n

Ada can run around in all directions and swing her wrench like a sword to attack enemies, and when you hold the button down, she\u2019ll charge up and her wrench will morph into a hammer for a powerful attack when you release the button.\u00a0 Another button activates your rocket boots so you can dash over small holes.\u00a0 You can also use gadgets like a crossbow or remote bombs, but you have to go a roundabout way to get them.\u00a0 Along your adventure you will come across caves that let you try out these inventions.\u00a0 And then when you come out of the cave, you don\u2019t get to keep that gadget, but you can reverse engineer it back at your base, which is a flying island.<\/p>\n

When you run out of energy while exploring the overworld, you\u2019ll collapse and a grabber crane from the flying island will pick you up and take you back to rest.\u00a0 On the flying island you can invent the gadgets you tried out in the overworld as well as buy widgets that are one time use items that you can take with you.\u00a0 But all this costs Sparklite, which is kind of the currency in this game, too.\u00a0 So to open up the workshop, you have to pay some money, then pay more to create a workbench where you can craft an item.\u00a0 Then crafting the item costs Sparklite, too. \u00a0And if you want to make another invention, you have to start the process over again.\u00a0 This made progression in the game for me a bit of a slog.\u00a0 It also felt like having in-game purchases in the game, except with Sparklite instead of real money.<\/p>\n

When you are ready to go back down to the overworld, the constant tremors will change the land so your map will be different each time.\u00a0 You\u2019re supposed to find caves with mining titans to defeat, but because of the randomly generated maps, the goals and objectives are very unclear.\u00a0 Plus the learning curve is set a bit high with enemies that can take off two hearts with one hit.\u00a0 Pretty tough when you only have four hearts total.\u00a0 And when you do run out of energy, all the quests you\u2019ve been working on are reset, except you do get to keep your Sparklite you\u2019ve collected.\u00a0 Me personally, I\u2019d rather have one well-designed level map instead of a bunch of mediocre randomly generated ones.\u00a0 Because of all this, I had a hard time really getting into the game.\u00a0 I did like the top-down Zelda gameplay and 16-bit style graphics, though.\u00a0 So if you like randomly generated games, you might enjoy this one more than I did.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sparklite is rated E-10 with an ESRB descriptor of Fantasy Violence.\u00a0 You can smack enemies with your wrench, hammer, or explosives, but they just disappear when defeated.\u00a0 When you run out of energy, you just fall over and the floating island picks you up so you can start anew.\u00a0 And that\u2019s about as violent as it gets.\u00a0 Reading skill is a must, and younger players may find the game too difficult.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The land of Geodia is powered by Sparklite, but when an evil Baron starts mining it to keep all for himself, the land fights back with tremors that change the environment to hinder his mining.\u00a0 But to stop the mining for good, a plucky young mechanic named Ada will save the day.\u00a0 Armed with her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19678"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19680,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19678\/revisions\/19680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}