Alien Spidy

RetroSpider  2016.04.26. 17:07

 

The story is simple: Aracnia, where our heroes decide that one of them will take an expedition to planet Earth while the other contants her and informs about conditions and such. Virgi, the girl alien-spider travels to Earth, however, Alien Spidy loses contact with her later. He worries about her girlfriend Virgi so he decides to travel to planet Earth by a spaceship, but his spaceship falls into pieces and crash-lands. He luckily survives the crash and ventures out to look for Virgi.

 

 

 

 

The gameplay doesn't sound complicated, however, getting used to it and mastering it will mince our nerves unless we're patient.

 

First of all, the final level can be unlocked only by a certain amount of stars. These stars can be gained by finishing the levels with high scores but the high scores depend on how good we perform on each levels. This means we should be quick, pick up the orbs we find on our way -which give us points and even more points if we gather them in combo movements- and survive until the finish line. Sounds easy, right, hehe?

 

WRONG!!!

 

Because a Draconian system works when the game looks at our scores: the scores are reducing with time and we can increase them only by gathering spheres and each time we die or decide to respawn, the game takes 2000 scores away. Not even mentioning that all the enemies can kill you with one hit: pillbugs, mosquitos, fish and other alien creatures together with natural hazards like water, spikes or poisonous gas from mushrooms. In short: being cautious and fast at once is a really hard thing when it comes to reach high scores.

 

 

The top of the iceberg are the controls of the game, I played with mouse and keyboard. I sometimes had trouble with the cross-hairs, because on a few occassions it disappeared and I couldn't see where I shoot webstrings.  It's very slippery and I had trouble when I tried web-swinging or jumping with Spidy because Spidy didn't react always when I pressed the jump button. Jumping must be precise to avoid all the dangers we have to face, same goes to web swinging. Web-swinging can be hard at times, a lot depends on the angles and the momentum. Spidy can shoot strings on the ground and mid-air as well, just like a real life spider.

 

Spidy has other abilities as well besides the ordinary web-swinging: he can later on gather special purple coloured orbs which will give him special abilities with a limited time. These are: flying, floating, swimming, dashing and attracting orbs. This is a good take to bring more creativity to Spidy's movement list but the slippery controls unfortunately kill the mood of these too.

 

   

 

I admit, the game also has a few pros too: I really liked the graphics, it's charming, unique and vector like, my favourite part of the game was the first chapter in level design. Speaking of which, there are flowers, roots, branches and sedges to web-swing on, I liked when the petals of the flowers moved when I was swinging on them. The background is colourful too, we can see crystals, houses or sedges, which makes us feel like we're really on Earth. Speaking of which: the enemies are Earth creatures too, but we have a few helping hands as well: mushrooms working as bouncepads and ladybirds to which we can shoot a string to get through a pond. The character designs are cute too, I like how Spidy's webstring glows in light blue colour and how he expresses his feelings with his movement when we finish a level with either low or high score.

 

 

 

The music is okay of the game, it's not something you'd listen to every day but it's good while playing. Simple tunes, but not memorable ones.

 

Overall: This game looks cute and gives us a big challenge, but this strict point-system ruined it together with the sloppy controls. I feel bad that such a simple and unique concept failed due to these negative things. I only recommend playing with Alien Spidy to those who have the courage to face with the patience-killing elements of the game. Not to mention the rage-bursting, randomly happenning fact that killed my mood and lost motivation not once to complete the whole game: the bug that randomly pops up and deletes your save file.

 

 

Platform: PC (Steam)

Year: 2013.

 

 

And this is my face when I try to gain more stars... or when I lose my save file...