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Review: Deadly Creatures
Deadly Creatures
THQ
Rainbow Studios
Wii
US Release: Out Now
UK Release: Out Now
Screenshot Gallery
In a genre more accustomed to caricature, on a console that has a reputation for catering to more frivolous, casual tastes, Deadly Creatures is boldly anomalous.
Rainbow has steered clear of cheery sub-Pixar bug-life to drag you into the chitinous horrors that lurk in the pages of National Geographic. Alternately giving the player control of a scorpion and a tarantula as they go about their daily business, Deadly Creatures demonstrates that the reality of survival at ankle height is every bit as gruesome as any number of viscera-soaked battlefields.
As well as offering the regular icky pleasures of stinging lizards in the mouth and plunging fangs through crunchy, oozing beetle carapaces, the game also has a lurid eye for horror when it comes to the juxtaposition of nasty, scuttling things and human paraphernalia.
A garden gnome’s brainpan becomes home to a nest of black widows; the eyes of a doll swivel open as your eight hairy legs probe its face. When the game ventures out of the inevitable preponderance of dirt tunnels it does a brilliant job of turning familiar environments into menacing landscapes by virtue of your reduced scale.
Not always are these precisely honed for gameplay, unfortunately – invisible walls, flabby collision and poor signposting hamper the way and, in spite of the care with which they are often drawn, they amount to little more than a sequence of interconnected chambers in which you eat things.
Of course, most games fall victim to such a reductionist description, but Deadly Creatures really does set its bar for interactivity fairly low by assigning you protagonists whose defining behavioural trait is walking up to things and stinging them.
But even as a straight-down-the-line brawler, Deadly Creatures has significant problems – gesture recognition often exasperates, particularly during finishing moves, when the QTE button prompts don’t align with the window in which you must press them.
The slothful unlocking of new moves painfully constrains the diversity of the game’s entertainment, and while the spider eventually enjoys a change of pace in the form of ranged attacks and increased manoeuvrability, the scorpion never benefits from similar generosity.
Being a short game, Deadly Creatures clearly recognises the limitations of its chosen genre, and it makes an admirable effort in splicing the humdrum play with some unusually competent storytelling, as seen from the perspective of some invertebrate bit-players.
Unfortunately, these critters, although eventually awkwardly coerced into an abrupt and final interaction with the background drama, spend most of the time sticking to their Darwinian remit of rummaging about in the dirt for grubs. This actual action is not rendered with nearly half the imagination or proficiency as the premise offers – and six hours of Remote-induced carpal tunnel syndrome and grim boss-battling overstay their welcome.
Attenborough has taught us that life in the undergrowth is thrillingly gruesome, but Deadly Creatures’ attenuation of the insect world to an arm-waggling munch ’em up is a bit of a louse.
5/10
Mmmm, I'm disappointed by this. Ho hum.
actually, rainbow studios has oodles of experience (shame on you if you've never heard of them) - hit the google and see for yourself . i think the main issues might have been time and, well... putting a game so ambitious on the wii (and thus relying on the control gimmick a wii bit too much). methinks the game would have done better as a more polished set of smaller xbla or psn downloads, a DS or PSP game. nevertheless, kudos to the team for trying something different.
the narrative is OK - a bit slow, but you're a pair of insects, not gordon freeman. the game is quite creepy (pun intended) at times and unlike jaws unleashed (that "other" nature game the kids got away with playing), if you look past the glitches, the experience can be compelling in small doses. the game is short because, frankly, there's only so much you can do with the idea.
I've had the game since release and it's pretty good fun in small doses as the gameplay is pretty much the same all the way through so far, i.e. encounter another creepy crawly, fight to the death, repeat. But after a spliff or two the game becomes very creepy, especially when the camera gets close to the insects body, freaks me out on my 37" HDTV :D
I can see where the 5 has come from, as there doesn't seem to be much to do apart from kill everything!!
Oh and the storyline hasn't really got going yet.
This game is definitely deserving of a 5/10. Clearly it was produced by someone with out much experience. A lot of gliches or "bugs" such as your camera getting stuck while your creature continues to walk into the horizon, and enemies gliching through the walls as you corner them at the side of levels. Also I was prevented from proceeding in a level after a continue, when the enemies would not respawn in their location forcing me to restart the chapter. Most of all this game is simply not an enjoyable experience.
so how's the narrative?