Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Honestly, I’m actually a little beyond half an hour into THQ’s Wii exclusive Deadly Creatures, but here’s my first impressions anyway.

Right away, you can tell there is some nice design here. The logo looks like a Discovery Channel show, which is entirely appropriate. The menus are classy and understated. It would have been really easy to go with a bunch of blood and splatter, with sharp heavy metal fonts. Instead, they went with a minimalist, broadcast-quality feel. (It’s a shame the box art is not nearly as polished.) The loading screens have film grain, but that’s as blatantly “dangerous” as the game gets with its design. If a game has an attractive menu structure, that’s worth a point to me. I damn near bought DiRT just based on the interface.

As for gameplay, Deadly Creatures is a lot of what you’ve seen before, but smartly focused onto the game’s big hook: that you’re a real tarantula (or scorpion.) What I mean by that is that this is a fairly typical action-adventure game with mostly linear paths, secret areas, upgradeable abilities, hidden unlockables, boss fights, platforming puzzles and a storyline that shows up at the end of every level. Even Link’s hookshot from Legend of Zelda makes an appearance.

But when you push all of that inside the “you’re a tarantula” box, it becomes way more impressive than you’d expect.

The game’s greatest accomplishment is turning realistic critters into badass gaming heroes and villains. Without compromising on the natural look of tarantulas, scorpions, snakes and beetles, these animals all act like something out of Street Fighter. It is positively wild. When the tarantula and the scorpion first meet, it feels like Clint Eastwood meeting Lee Van Cleef (or Vin Diesel meeting anyone, if you’re under a certain age.) While there are some poses that do go over the top for dramatic effect (unless scorpions do generally dislocate lizard jaws), most of the attacks look like genuine animalistic moves. And the walking! Holy crap, did they nail arachnid movement. Fifteen years ago, this concept would have been a cartoony N64 game with talking spiders and silly names. Today it looks awfully real.

But although things look very realistic – the first portion of the game takes place entirely in a section of the Sonoran Desert, which circles the Gulf of California – there are plenty of game design sacrifices in place. For example, spiders can crawl anywhere, right? Well, Deadly Creatures has necessary barriers that maintain the game’s faux reality. So you can’t truly creep everywhere. Luckily, the barriers look natural, like canyon walls, rocky outcropping and thorny cacti, but it may seem weird that your tarantula can’t physically climb that wall.

There is a bit too much Wii waggle for my liking, especially since the timing required for the waggle can be hard to manage. If you waggle sideways immediately after you hit A to attack, you’re supposed to get a bonus sideswipe on the enemy. But if you miss the attack, or if the baddie blocks you, you’re still probably emotionally committed to the waggle anyway… so you end up waggling for nothing, while the enemy scores a cheap hit. You can increase the sensitivity for motion input, so I’m going to experiment with that and see if it helps fine tune the experience.

(I just got to a cool waggle control that is WAY outside the First Thirty mark, but it is so cool I have to bring it up. The scorpion eventually learns a burrow strike attack, where you have to turn the Wii Remote upside down to hide under the dirt, and then flick it up to attack whatever bug may have wandered on top of you!)

Dennis Hopper and Billy Bob Thornton provide the mostly off-camera voice acting. Off-camera because a real tarantula wouldn’t pause to hear two treasure-hunting humans speak. Usually what happens is the level will naturally direct you towards an area and you’ll hear the humans talking to each other far above as you scoot by. In the beginning of the game they’re searching to dig up a body… and you being underground, you actually stalk through the coffin they’re looking for before they find it. It is awesome how the game dovetails the bug experience with the human plotline.

Being a offbeat game with no IP and a creepy setting, I will not be surprised to see this flameout at retail. So far, though, it deserves some attention. I’m looking forward to see how the game will continue to play with the concept by moving beyond the desert setting.