Deadly Creatures is tragic: tragic because I loved it so much and it had so little game play to give. This game, in a nutshell, is a Magic School Bus-esque odyssey of two extremely violent invertebrates. And for all of those readers who recall learning about the food chain in primary school, this will be a great refresher course. Deadly Creatures involves running (scuttling) around a rather impressively rendered desert environment, killing anything and everything that you encounter in your path. And, besides, any game in which one gets to sting Dennis Hopper in the balls can’t be all bad.

I found this game delightful for a myriad of reasons (testicle stinging withstanding) with the fantastic controls and camera movements at the fore. While perhaps not completely original, the handling of the main “characters” is near-mind expanding. Following a tarantula as it climbs up walls and onto ceilings with a camera following faithfully after might not seem to be anything special, but when I was playing, I found my head turning to try and catch up. The result is something right on the edge of disorienting but still wickedly fun.

Novel ideas aside, Deadly Creatures is not for the faint of heart. One of the basic attack/commands is known simply as “feed”. The sound effects alone are brutal, very wet sounding, and match wonderfully to the carnage on screen. And there is much carnage to be had. Sure, the spraying of blood looks like gore added into unrated horror flicks in post-production, but it is nevertheless disgusting. But all of this brutality definitely adds up to unrepentant, horrible glee during game play. The various coup-de-grâce in the game are brilliant and no matter how many times I’d seen them (there is a different ones for each opponent type, per usual), they still made me giggle in delight. Performing these coup-de-grâce is rather like a rudimentary form of Dance Dance Revolution, forcing one to move the controls just so to gain the desired, bloody result. All and all, a little fiddly but oh-so-much fun.

Many a valuable life lesson can be gleaned from this video game. For example: spiders don’t have maps. They do, however, have health bars. Without a map, this game relies heavily on the hint arrow that can be activated by hitting the “2” button on the Wii-mote. Without this feature, I would have given up on this game an hour in—it’s just too frustrating without it. There are leading tactics to be found such as special grubs and crickets that increase your health, but because of their role as a Collect-Them-All gimmick, it’s not a reliable way to make one’s way through the terrain. That said, the crunching sound emitted when one does collect one of these items is satisfying.

The enemies in this game, while not unexpected, are somewhat refreshing and who wouldn’t want to beat up on a rattlesnake given the chance—or Dennis Hopper? Although “enemies” perhaps isn’t the correct term for the other creatures encountered during game play. This game really does follow it’s own apparent tagline “hunt or be hunted” in the fact that there aren’t really any bad guys (well, not any non-humans, at least), just other creatures that need to be dealt with in order to keep living/playing.

But all of the great aspects of this game are somewhat mitigated by the fact that while playing on the easiest mode, I casually beat this game in less than 24 hours. Really, I wasn’t even trying to get to the end and definitely wasn’t marathon-playing. That’s the most disappointing thing of all; the game wasn’t fleshed out enough to have anything resembling a plot. Instead, there’s a story that’s told by, of all people, Billy Bob Thorton that has absolutely not bearing on the action whatsoever and merely acts as a rationalization to get into Dennis Hopper’s pants. Literally. This game plays like a demo of sorts where skills are learned quickly and are soon mastered but there doesn’t seem to be any real challenge to the movements after the first hour or so. A deeper development of the “characters” and maybe a bit more of a focus on some sort of plot could have made the short game time more acceptable. As it stands, however, it’s a fun concept that was never given a fair day’s worth of game development. All and all it’s as though hearing the story of Snow White from the perspective of the apple.

Ratings:

Gameplay: B plus

Overall Game: C