Deadly Creatures

Deadly Creatures

Become a creepy-crawly and save the day in this fascinating adventure designed especially for Nintendo Wii.

With very few gamer’s games available for Wii, it’s true that we were unusually eager to get stuck into this latest quest from THQ. If it’s a break from all the carnival games and silly sports we’ll take it, just hand over the remote! You’ll read many times that this or that game features ‘innovative use of the Wii remote and nunchuck’ but in the case of Deadly Creatures this is a truth that has been fantastically realised.

Bet you never dreamed of playing as a Tarantula or a Scorpion in a video game. Deadly Creatures casts you as both, scurrying around beneath the world of humans, thinking about your own survival while a couple of moody guys above ground are plotting something mysterious. As a critter you only catch glimpses here and there until your fates are cleverly intertwined. The voice-acting, you’ll be surprised to learn, is provided by Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper who sound like they’re up to no good even when they’re behaving good as gold.

In truth it’s hard to find a category that fits Deadly Creatures. The game is part ambient exploratory experience, part action adventure, and at all times weird… but in a cool way. Your role alternates between tarantula and scorpion several times during each chapter, revealing their strengths and weaknesses.

Because they’re creepy-crawlies our unlikely heroes can climb walls and dash upside down across ceilings within their mostly cavernous environments. You’ll learn bug abilities too – the tarantula fires webbing at enemies to stun them, or leaps from distance to land stealth attacks; the scorpion uses its powerful claws to flip over its prey and then finish using a sting or by pulling them apart. Each move is assigned a clever combination of button presses and gestures using the Wii remote and nunchuck. Similar techniques reveal secret ‘rooms’ full of delicious lava or merely offer a more efficient way of making up distance – web-slinging or burrowing, etc.

Enemies are mostly quite small and are there to keep you busy munching as opposed to proving a real threat. Quite often though you’ll run into serious danger as giant snakes, spiny lizards, and packs of rats test your knowledge of the full range of combat skills. Other than when trying to remember which way is up while finding your way around, the face-offs with bigger creatures really challenge you to stop and think.

The game looks great on Wii; you might even call it a work of art. All the creatures are superbly drawn and animate very realistically. Because the whole drama takes place somewhere in the Sonaran desert, however, the colour palate contains many shades of green and brown and even when there’s a splash of red it’s dark in hue. Roughly a third of the game is spent bathed in sunlight, by our reckoning, but the rest is in the shade. You could call it beautiful but not pretty, hence you end up feeling a little subdued over a long session. That said, the path before you is never less than compelling and we’ve enjoyed searching every nook and cranny.

Wii gamers being more receptive to new ideas than most, Deadly Creatures comes highly recommended from us – not just for younger relatives either because adults will find this fascinating stuff too.

4 out of 5