Spiritual Warfare

We Christians have to stick together.Number of Levels: The action is spanned across a number of areas – a park, a downtown area, a residential district, a slum, an airport, a warehouse, a hotel district, a prison, a forest, a beach, and a demon stronghold. Basically all the typical areas you'd find in any city. What's more, you will be venturing in doors quite a bit as you look for keys, items, and fight endbosses.

One of the fatal flaws of this game is the utter absurdity of most of the indoor environments. While, for example, the church looks fairly normal on the inside, most other buildings are a complicated maze of ladders and traps. The typical town, as you probably are aware, possesses buildings of no such nature. Even a downtown high rise in this game looks absolutely ridiculous on the inside, as it appears to be a dungeon of stone blocks, ladders, and barrels. Most cities have rigid safety codes that prevent such insanities from existing. In fact, all buildings are required to be handicapped accessible, and ladders are rather discouraging to people in wheelchairs. Perhaps this is part of the reason you are on your quest – to champion better building codes. I'm disappointed the designers of this game – all four of them – lacked the basic understanding of typical building interiors. What's more, they demonstrated the unchristian trait of laziness in completely failing to do even the minutest of research, which would have gone a long way towards making the game more realistic and thusly more compelling.

Oh no, terrorists are attacking the woods!

Number of Bosses: Each area has an endboss for you to tackle, as well as a steady stream of various sorts of sinners. It is not known whether the endbosses are chosen on the basis of how sinful they are, or how skilled they are at fighting non-sinners. While this is a fascinating topic, it scarcely warrants debate when you consider the first endboss is a caveman masquerading as a rock that shoots out demons. Clearly, the forces of evil are not lacking in imagination and are more than prepared to trump the stupidity of a fruit-hurling hero.

Defining Moment: The horror of taking advantage of the most ridiculously lax airport security in the world. Upon approaching the entrance to the airport, I had to fight off several thugs while two security officers guarding the front entrance paid zero attention. When I approached them, they merely suggested I stay off the red area or some such. Since they were not concerned with crime, I ignored them and entered the airport. To my unbridled terror, there were suitcases scattered everywhere. In this age of heightened security, the harrowing sight of dozens of mysterious packages with no owners resting all about nearly drove me to write an angry letter to my congressman. The only thing that stopped me was the sudden realization that I had become so engrossed in the realistic goals and graphics of this game, that I momentarily lost my grasp on reality.

Unattended baggage will be searched by Jesus.To make things even more dangerous, I climbed into the baggage carousel and saw the twisting maze that our luggage goes through on its post-flight journey. After that, I took to the unguarded runways where I was challenged by an even greater number of thugs. It occurred to me right away that any number of these troublemakers could simply climb aboard a plane, take off, and pilot it into a densely populated area with no resistance. If this was a real airport, it would be condemned by the entire world, and President Bush would deploy peacekeeping troops to it. This one single airport represents a unconscionable gap in national security and an unimaginable threat to our safety. Let this be a profound example as to just how dangerous the influence of Satan can be if left unchecked.

All and all, the game has some great moments and some big flaws. It raises some serious questions about the nature of God and religion, in particular, the issues of punishment and salvation. The discrepancies in the nature of how people are saved versus how they are punished is troubling, since it seems their only punishment is the pain and uncertainty of the brief moment that succeeds being hit with fruit and proceeds being magically converted into a praying child. The presence of cavemen also alludes to the concept of evolution, which seems horribly out of place. Perhaps, though, Wisdom Tree merely intended to promote discourse and critical thinking by including controversial elements that would spark debate. That scenario seems unlikely, and of course we will probably never know the actual answer. All and all, the game is a true standout in its genre. If all religious games were like this, then people wouldn't laugh at them so much. Sadly, though, when compared to non-religious games, Spiritual Warfare is complete and utter shit. Even still, the seeds of something special are clearly visible when playing. You can see how Spiritual Warfare would go on to inspire Nintendo to produce the less stellar knockoff, The Legend of Zelda.

– Josh "Livestock" Boruff (@Livestock)