Alien Spidy is an addition to a long line of platformer games that look to challenge you. It really does too good of a job. From the developers at Kalypso Media comes the story of Spidy who has lost contact with his explorer friend, Virgi. Spidy’s last contact shows that Virgi was on or around Earth at the time and sets out to find her. Unfortunately for Spidy, his ship breaks apart while entering the atmosphere. Spidy’s search for his friend now includes finding key pieces of his ship so he can repair that, find his friend, and return home.
First and foremost, it’s important to know that EVERYTHING will kill you. Thorns, ponds, other bugs & creatures, and droplets of water. Second, all of the levels are timed and you score more points by collecting orbs, some of which decrease in value the longer you take to collect them. The more points you score the more stars you earn (up to five) for completing the level. Finally, the controls are frustrating. The kind of frustrating that makes you want to embed your controller into the wall.
There are three environments that are split up into 69 levels total to challenge you and your patience. The basic layout of a level is: you run as fast as you can from the start to the finish, jumping over obstacles, hopping on platforms, and shooting a web out to swing from one place to another or to reach higher ground. This is where the difficulty starts to make its ugly presence known. It’s one thing to mess up timing-wise on a jump and land in the water instead of on a moving platform; it’s a whole other thing when you flick the right thumbstick to the upper-right and the web shoots out straight to the right.
Momentum carries you through a lot of spaces when swinging on the web. Get your timing down and you can swing in an excellent arc that picks up a bunch of orbs and connects you to your next web shot target. IF you can get your timing down. Above all else, getting up in the air, aiming your web shot just right, the web actually going where you aim, and then hitting the jump button at just the right time seems to be more than the game is capable of producing on a consistent basis. Or we just really suck.
Promoted as a great game for casual and core gamers, I would argue that casual gamers avoid Alien Spidy the same way that arachnophobes avoid eight-legged bugs at all costs. Earning enough stars to move on through the game requires some serious intestinal fortitude and a fair bit of luck. Even core gamers might find the game on a difficulty level that only the truly masochistic or physics masters will want to keep trying. It just doesn’t have that “addictive” quality that other puzzle games and platformers of the past have.
Unless you’re really looking for a challenge, or have played everything else that interests you (or just everything else period), avoiding this gray-hair-inducing demon dressed up as a cute adventure game is recommended.
Alien Spidy was provided to The Married Gamers for review.
