Deadly Creatures Review
It’s not a topic most people like to dwell on: the creepy crawlies that scuttle across the floor, carrying enough venom to paralyze their victims, or worse. But that’s exactly the focus of Deadly Creatures, where you take command of both a tarantula and a scorpion in a dusty, rural setting as the two arachnids battle bugs and beasts as they struggle to survive. It’s enough to make your skin crawl, watching these pests creep over rocks, walls, and ceilings, yet it makes for a surprisingly satisfying adventure, while it lasts.
There are two separate stories going on in this game: the lives and conflicts of the lethal creatures, and the escapades of George Struggs and Wade, voiced by Dennis Hopper and Billy Bob Thornton, respectively. It’s a little perplexing that the developers felt the need to include two well known actors for such minor voice-over roles, but they both perform wonderfully as seedy men. The two men are on a hunt for the second half of a map to a chest full of gold, but what they find is far more deadly. The story is told from the perspective of the arachnids, but their travels are far less bound by plot mechanisms. Aside from the last couple of chapters, there is little structure that guides their movements, aside from pursuing prey and fleeing predators. The story that is there is hardly complex or powerful, but it wraps up nicely and introduces some occasional comic relief provided by the human characters
Yes, that is a skeletal human hand. Yes, you are crawling around inside someone’s coffin. Creeped out yet?
From the perspective of the spider and the scorpion, the world takes on a very different appearance. The smallest obstacles become gargantuan hurdles to cross, cacti tower overheard many times your size, and humans become colossi around you. The camera is a blessing and a curse in this respect–it stays close to you, emphasizing your size and your perspective, but because it adheres to your position so closely, it can be shaky and disorienting in tight spaces. Your travels often take you through small underground tunnels, and here the camera can be brutal. The motion-sick prone should beware as some of these portions can wreck havoc on your eyes, and with only limited camera control, some of these paths can be particularly troublesome.
Though both are deadly creatures, the spider and the scorpion are quite different. The former is fast and spry, relying upon quick attacks and retreats in order to take down large foes, while the latter is slow and methodical, requiring foresight to wind up an attack and strike. Each chapter alternates which creature you control–beginning with the spider–so you’ll have plenty of back and forth between the two characters. Both are a lot of fun to control, especially when climbing up walls and ceilings. Oftentimes you’ll use the scorpion to retread an area the spider was in moments ago, but because each has different capabilities, each take different paths. For example, the scorpion can dig his way through small blockages of dirt, while the spider can web-sling (Spider-man, eat your heart out) to any spider webs in the area. It’s a little disappointing that so many environments are reused, but the different abilities of each beast provide some variety.
Web-sling your way around large obstacles, including human obstructions.
It wouldn’t be an adventure if there weren’t enemies to defeat along the way. You’ll run into a variety of insects, rodents, and even a few lizards as you fight for survival. It’s a bug-eat-bug world, but thankfully both creatures are prepared for combat with various moves. Most require merely pressing the A button, but some motion controls make an appearance. This isn’t a waggle-fest, however, and because you can adjust the sensitivity of your swing, combat is rarely tiresome. You can even deliver fancy finishing moves as the tarantula, performing a short series of quick-time event motion commands, allowing you to watch the life seep out of your victims from dynamic angles. Battles can be a little far between, though. For the large territories that you explore, enemy bugs can be infrequent, leading to a lot of time spent crawling over empty surroundings.
Those surroundings, however, drip with ambiance, from the huge, dark, and desolate environments to the haunting lack of music. There is something dark and dangerous in the crevices you explore, and the mood that the game establishes matches it perfectly. The clicking and buzzing sound effects of bugs punctuate the silent atmosphere, and the massive dark and brown world seems devoid of life, of happiness. This world is by no means beautiful or stunning, but it works within the context of a dark and oppressive story. Occasionally the brief conversations of George Struggs and Wade pop up, providing some comic relief and reminding you that there is something human in this grim land, though those humans might prove more beastly than the insects that scurry underfoot.
Dusty and desolate; just the way this spider likes it.
This large environment is not without its faults, of course. Graphical glitches occur, from minor misplaced shadows to flashing the wrong creature for a few seconds. You could be playing as the scorpion, when you suddenly appear to be the tarantula. It’s an odd and infrequent error, but these mistakes can appear. Though the game tries to be smooth about them, load times do occasionally crop up, often quite unexpectedly. You could be walking from one tunnel to another when the game suddenly pauses, loading the next section. Thankfully they are generally short, so the game generally has a nice, near seamless feel to it.
Deadly Creatures is not at all a game for the faint-hearted, from the insidious creatures you play as to the guttural sound effects. It won’t take you long to skulk your way through the entire game, and the grubs to collect and different difficulty levels don’t spur on much replay value. In essence, this is an interestingly grotesque adventure with plenty of soul but not a lot of body–you most likely won’t be lingering on this one, and there’s nothing truly fascinating to snare you and keep you in the spider’s web. Deadly Creatures makes for a great rental, though, and is worth a look for those that have the stomach for this creepy adventure.
7/10
~Eliwood
