To be clear, this review is going to be a comparison between Spelunker World (A game for the PS4) and Spelunker Party, and is meant for people who have played a lot of Spelunker World and are interested in Spelunker Party (as I was).

Item Acquisition
If I had to describe Spelunker Party (SP) to someone who has played Spelunker World (SW), I would describe it as a SW sandbox. A lot of “branching path” sets of levels lead to one of the many pets in the game, giving you them for free after completion of the last level in those “sets.” Doing this by the end of World 2, you will have ALL CHARACTERS AND ALL PET ARCHETYPES. This is especially frustrating for people like me who went through the trouble of getting Spelunkette’s Sister in SW, having to collect the daunting 300 stars. Litho-Stones function differently in this game: They contain a guaranteed set of items, and once they are picked up from a level, going back to pick them up again will result in them being replaced with upgrade stones of varying quality based on their litho-stone quality (blue - bronze, silver - silver, purple - gold). Doggy Digging has been completely removed and replaced with the Pooch option visible from the menu unlocked about halfway into World 1, where you can send the dog into a cave for a varying amount of in-game coins dependant on which cave you send him into. He has a chance of retrieving an item, or an exorbitant amount of silver upgrade stones (50 to 150). As there are no item event stages, or events at all, promotional items referencing characters from other games do not exist in SP (RIP Ace’s Cards). The only new items in this game are the four 4-star capes you can collect (one for each world). One last thing I will briefly touch on is the Quest system. Not much of note here besides a range of tasks you can complete for a variety of items from just coins to basically free 4-star items early on which ends up being really nice. My only gripe with it is that you can only have one quest active at a time, despite a lot of quests being seemingly overlapping. I.e “Destroy 10 breakable walls in World 2” & “Collect 20 Miracles” could easily be completed side by side as you play nevertheless you’re forced to do one before the other. But I cannot go any longer without talking about the item system.

Item System & Economy
For starters, 1-star items and bronze/brown litho-stones are completely removed in Spelunker Party. Only gear with abilities remain present in SP. In Spelunker World, you could collect multiple versions of the same item to power up the one you were using, and in the case of 3 and 4-star items you could infuse their abilities into other 3 and 4-star items to make entirely unique gear pieces tailored to your way of playing. That system has been all but COMPLETELY REMOVED from SP. In SP you are only allowed one copy of an item, and it can only be upgraded to a certain level. As an item in SP levels, it will gain all of it’s charges and uses until it hits its max level. You cannot combine items like you could in SW to create ultra-powerful 4 stars with perks from the best two items for that slot. Each 4-star item comes with its own two perks and that's that. Just leveling an item to unlock its full potential is instrumental, but I don’t think it was worth the trade-off of having completely unique 4-star loadouts thanks to ability infusion. This new system in SP makes leveling pets much more worthwhile because by level 10 they have all 5 or so charges depending on the pet and are at their natural max but they can’t be absolutely broken like in SW (notable example is how a Black Star Tom could eliminate all existing enemies from large levels just because of the sheer range ability infusion gave him).

Levels & Story
When it comes to the single player campaign I’ve never been a huge fan of it. I’ve always appreciated the gear system and making my own loadouts more; the levels were always just a nice place to test my loadouts to see just how effective/insane I could make them. All of the levels from Spelunker World are back in Spelunker Party, with the edition of a 5th "EX World" which is also just a bunch of event levels from SW. These are advertised as harder than the levels in the other 4 worlds but by that point you have pretty much every important 4-star item in the game, so they’re more of a pushover. As far as the story is concerned, it’s the same “saving the Earth’s Core” plot but with more focus on the effect it’s having on all the creatures of the earth as opposed to getting the gang together like it was in Spelunker World.

Multiplayer & Closing
Unfortunately, the multiplayer for Spelunker Party is all but dead. No rooms exist (at least on PC) at any given time. This makes how easy it is to get 4-star items and any pet you want a little bit more justified as its more of a single-player Spelunker experience. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially after the “Frown on Brown Litho-Stones” movement that took place in SW where people would become toxic/instantly leave and let others die in missions if you even THOUGHT about picking up the bronze litho-stones (this movement is why I personally stopped playing SW, as it was way too toxic and basically killed my enjoyment of the game). This makes the experience of SP a breath of fresh air for a veteran like me. As much as I would love to see a surge in this game’s popularity, I don’t expect one, as anyone with thousands of hours and hundreds of dollars poured into the original would never give that up for a game like this. But on the other side of the coin, if you only ever played SW casually or didn’t play it at all because of the inherent difficulty, you would probably get more enjoyment out of this entry in the series as you get to experience almost everything a Spelunker title has to offer with little to no challenge.

All in all, I would consider it more of a spin-off than a port due to the amount of fundamental changes to the system. I had fun with it, you might too.