Can a mobile heavy hitter make an impact on consoles?
Developer/publisher Nekki
Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series
Origin Cyprus
Release 2025
Unless you pay close attention to the mobile game scene, Cypriot studio Nekki could be one of the biggest developers you’ve never heard of. Established in 2002, the Limassol-based company boasts more than 330 million downloads for its parkour action game Vector and its sequel. Fighting game/RPG hybrid Shadow Fight 2, meanwhile, has reached a staggering 420 million downloads. It’s hard not to notice, though, as it shares these figures on a slide over Zoom, that the latter game’s most recent successor, Shadow Fight 4: Arena, is currently sitting on a mere 60 million.
Whether that’s down to diminishing returns or otherwise, the studio is seeking to make waves elsewhere with its first console game, powered by a combination of Unreal 5 and its own bespoke animation engine, dubbed Cascadeur. As producer and design supervisor Dmitry Pimenov talks us through an early demo of the project, it’s clear Nekki is very much playing to its strengths with Spine, drawing upon a decade’s worth of “expertise in action games, animation and fight choreography” honed on mobile.
Which is to say that Spine looks pretty much exactly like you’d expect it to from that information. It’s a handsome but familiarlooking action game whose influences are so obvious that roughly half of Pimenov’s commentary is redundant. You play as young street artist Redline, as she takes on waves of goons en route to rescuing her brother, who’s been kidnapped by “an autocratic AI regime”. The twist is that Redline is herself augmented – by the sentient i
