When I was first asked to check out Spine at Summer Game Fest 2025, I hadn’t heard of it yet. I looked it up on Steam and thought it looked pretty rad, so I booked an appointment, though I also expected it would kick my butt. Sometimes that’s the job, and that’s okay. I compared it to Sifu in my mind, which I always found to be really difficult. However, once I got to go hands-on with it, I found it’s more like a Batman Arkham game in terms of its combat gameplay. Those familiar mechanics helped me look stylish and deadly in my demo, and put Spine on my radar ahead of its launch next year.
Spine comes from Nekki, a team that has previously developed mobile games, including the popular Shadow Fight series. Even Spine originally began as a mobile game, but as the project grew and took on a different shape, the team realized it had an opportunity to make its debut on PC and consoles. Inspired by the career works of John Woo and other stylish action movies, Spine is a “gun-fu” combat game in a cyberpunk setting with a simple story setup.
In it, you play as Redline, a character whose physical look is so cool in my opinion that it got me to book the demo. The punky street artist’s origin story is much like John Wick’s, though instead of a dead dog, it’s her kidnapped brother who compels her to get into ass-kicking mode. The 15-20 hour game is said to start small in terms of Redline’s motivation and increase the stakes from there. What she expects is a personal quest to save her brother soon pulls her into a criminal underworld of AI overlords and corrupt people in power across the colorful but troubled city.
In my time with the game, I lit up bad guys in bars, hallways, and rooftops with roundhouse kicks, haymakers, and blasts of my dual-wielded pistols. The game wears its inspirations on its sleeve. This is a game from people who unabashedly love movies like The Matrix and Hard Boiled. Nekki isn’t shying away from that, perhaps best displayed in its hallway fight scene reminiscent of Oldboy. It’s leaning into it. But I was happy to see the game uses combat systems more like the Batman Arkham series, in which it’s not too tough to chain together attack combos, execute well-timed counters to keep chains alive, and periodically switch to finishing moves performed by pressing a pair of face buttons.
Redline was fierce and swift, taking down groups of four or more enemies at a time with regularity. I could also use a trigger button to spray-paint enemies huddled around me, much like Batman’s cap stun attack. The paint would stick to the enemies and the environment, giving it a nice visual touch in which you literally left your mark on a brawl. I could shoot whenever I wanted to, but it’s not a shooter. The guns were best used as combo finishers, which you can see stylish examples of in the trailer above.
While the game won’t necessarily be “easy,” it’s not meant to send you beating your head into a wall. With people’s busy schedules in mind, a developer told me the studio wants players to be able to play for just a short while and feel like they’ve made progress. If you come home from work and only have a little time to play games, you should be able to load up Spine, crack a few skulls, and feel like you’ve accomplished something in your short timeframe. And for players who do want more of a challenge, the game will offer a mode in which you have to avoid taking any damage at all. Good luck with that.
I liked Sifu, but more on the merits of its art direction, story, and, sure, how good the combat looked when I could pull it off. But Spine made me feel just as powerful without the accompanying frustrations, and personally, I’m way more up for that kind of experience. Whereas some games of this sort leave me feeling like a nameless goon at times, Spine made me feel like one of Keanu Reeves’ punchiest roles.
Spine comes to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S in 2026.
