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In the First Thirty of Deadly Creatures, I was entranced by the setting and level design, but a little put off by the waggle. As it turns out, this is an accurate summary of the entire game. I finished the game this week, to the tune of over ten hours of killing beetles and dodging snakes… not to mention stinging Dennis Hopper in the crotch.

There is nothing quite like Deadly Creatures on the Wii racks. For that reason alone, it’s worth a look. With all the barely-restrained flamboyance of a Discovery Channel documentary, Deadly Creatures puts you in the alternating adventures of a tarantula and scorpion. The arachnids’ goal is nothing more than to creep through the desert environments eating every small insect and murdering every large one, but the game neatly counterpoints the Wild Nature angle with two human characters voiced by Billy Bob Thornton and the aforementioned Hopper.

The game’s entire trick is the feat of presenting a realistic (well, nearly so) portrayal of the brutality of life on the desert floor… yet confining and defining that experience through the trappings of video gamedom. Spiders, gila monsters, crickets, rats and wasps all behave very naturally, but are clearly fulfilling roles as level bosses, health-ups and roving gangs of palette-swapped thugs. The desert itself has been re-imagined as a giant labyrinth. You can’t crawl over every surface – as you may imagine a tarantula could – but Deadly Creatures makes an effort to visually explain why you can’t, through careful use of rocky cliffs, spiky cacti and other natural barriers.

In short, that’s what makes Deadly Creatures worthwhile. It’s very normal game conventions filtered through a very different setting. And it is a sight to see! Unfortunately, some technical issues and the ever-present motion controls show up to harsh your buzz.

Deadly Creatures begins with a brief narration from Billy Bob Thornton, making it clear that the entire game is a flashback. As Thornton talks about an exploding gas station, you may well wonder just how a tarantula could be involved. By game’s end, you see how it all comes together. And while it is certainly nothing you’d nominate for Story of the Year, it works well enough, and it does not veer off into anything outlandish like having the scorpion learn to talk and explode the gas station himself like Wile E. Coyote.

In fact, I’d say the act of storytelling here is greater than the story itself, because it is cool to “overhear” the humans talking as you stalk nearby. In a smart twist, the tarantula and the scorpion each become part of the humans’ story in different ways at the same time, so at several points you may not have your questions answered until you have completed both critters’ viewpoints.

The tarantula and the scorpion takes turns over each of the game’s ten levels. They look fantastic. If they did not look as great, or if they did not move as convincingly, Deadly Creatures would have its wings plucked. Obviously the developer (Rainbow Studios, part of the THQ empire) knew that it was critical to get these guys absolutely right. It is fun just to walk them across the map, watching the intricate way the legs all move in concert. Leave the game sitting on the title screen during your next party if you want to really creep people out.

In his Bonus Material interview, Thornton refers to the two beasts as legendary gunslingers. That’s the vibe Deadly Creatures throws throughout (set to understated music that sounds straight out of HBO’s Deadwood series). When the tarantula walks into a clearing and finds a trio of enemy wolf spiders, it’s like a movie where the stoic lead cleans out a bar full of surly bikers. When one of the wolf spiders raises his forelegs in the air and screeches, that’s when the biker gang’s leader smashes a wine bottle on the edge of a table and dares the hero to come closer. Deadly Creatures is like that from start to finish.

The tarantula is speedy, can jump, and eventually learns a webline ability. The scorpion is all melee damage, can block enemy attacks, and can dig through certain obviously marked areas. Each critter can explore the same environment in different ways, revealing distinct paths and specific hidden areas. Unfortunately, since the game is mostly linear, this means the game has no problem with plopping you back into the same area as a “new” level, so that you can go through once as the tarantula and webshoot into the sky, and then again as the scorpion and dig into underground tunnels. It sort of makes you feel like you’re in a free-roaming sandbox game, but really the level design is herding you along. It doesn’t happen every time (don’t think this is only FIVE levels split into ten), it does happen often enough that you feel a little bit cheated when you realize you’re back in the same area again.

But the good news is that the level design is brilliant. Given that Deadly Creatures is going for natural realism but still must make it all fit into a game paradigm, it’s crazy awesome. Even though you can’t literally walk everywhere, the game does know that you’re a frickin’ bug and so the level path will wind sideways up sheer mountain walls and deep into subterranean tunnels where “up” no longer has any meaning. That seems to me to be part and parcel of the insect experience. Often you will pick your way across a cactus or plank, and the only clue you have as to which way is down is the direction the enemy spiders fall when you throw them. Sometimes you have to think like a bug, and let yourself explore in three dimensions to divine where you have to go next… sort of similar to how the asteroid gravity worked in Super Mario Galaxy.

Occasionally, all of this directional shifting is murder on the camera. Or the tarantula model will get all twitchy because the game isn’t sure what plane the bug should be walking on. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does it clearly disrupts the naturalistic appeal of the gameworld.

And while the first half of Deadly Creatures takes place entirely in a desert, you do eventually get to a junkyard (watch for the old coin-op arcade cabinet!) and other civilized areas. Yes, at one point you will crawl through plumbing and emerge in a toilet bowl, justifying every nightmare you had while on vacation in Arizona. It’s a shame that it doesn’t branch out into more environments, although what you do get is done very well.

So we’ve got a compelling take on traditional action games, with unique exploration-based level design and truly lifelike character models. But then the waggle shows up to make things frustrating.

Deadly Creatures, like a lot of Wii games, simply goes too far with the motion controls. For some things, it is entirely appropriate; to direct where to shoot a webline, you use the Wii Remote like a pointer. Duh. I’m even okay with slamming the Remote downwards to simulate the scorpion’s tail attack. However, Deadly Creatures mapped the entire combo structure to motion controls, and made combat animations slow and imperfect to boot.

Your basic attack is on the A button. You can string together a bunch of A attacks and be okay. But to really do some damage, you have to add some motion control gestures in there… which, when performed correctly, provide devastating follow-up attacks to your basic A. The tarantula, for example, will swipe on A but then toss an enemy into the air if you shake the Remote up after the A.

It looks cool, but the timing is too tricky to pull it off with any confidence. Enemies don’t wait for your clever animations to finish, so you’ll take a lot of hits while you’re trying to go for the waggle attack… which then ends the combo potential anyway.

Some additional gesture controls (swipe sideways) trigger silly spinning attacks – which has got to be an area where the developer took liberties with nature. The tarantula will leap and spin, hitting a baddie with all eight legs. I don’t think that happens a lot in the real world. But again, the windup for these spins is killer, being offensively long. Any incoming attack will cancel the spin before it happens. I gave up on the spins really early on.

There are some motion controls done right, however. When an enemy is near death (and there’s no meter to tell you this, by the way), you get a little C-button icon that will trigger a brutal finishing move. These attacks get their own dramatic camera change… as you perform various gestures to onscreen cues, Quick Time Event-style. In one of my favorite moves (and again, I don’t believe this to be an accurate representation of life in the Sonoran Desert), the scorpion uses his tail to sweep the rat off his feet and then pounces on the rat’s back, plunging his stinger into the base of the rat’s skull. While that plays out, you’re doing two to three gestures with the controller. Another, more difficult, finishing move, has you pulling the Remote and Nunchuk in opposite directions to yank the wings off a wasp. If you flub one of the cued gestures, the finishing move sequence ends with no damage done to the enemy.

When credits rolled on Deadly Creatures, I wanted to play more, despite the somewhat flaky waggle. I would have liked to follow the human storyline further. Ten hours is waaaaaay too short for a game like this, especially with little replay value. Although there are three difficulty settings, we all know what that means: the bad guys take more hits to kill, nothing more.

There is only a spare list of unlockable items – art galleries, mostly – which are not so incredible that they’re worth hunting down all of the collectibles to unlock them. (How about being able to play as other bugs? How about some time trial challenges? I’d even try some insect-based minigames!) Better unlockables would have helped fill out the package.

I think Deadly Creatures is going to live on as one of those overlooked, slightly undercooked gems. Every system gets them: bizarre, clever, oddball titles that develop cult followings (and occasionally sequels!) When I look back at Deadly Creatures, I’m not going to remember getting frustrated by floaty motion controls; I’m going to remember what it was like to be a six inch tarantula and creep through the rusted remains of an old pick-up truck. Because that was freaking awesome. Like Deception or Killer 7 or Elebits, these are titles that will never rank among the best games of all time, but they all contain specific elements that lift them higher than their technical weaknesses would suggest. Especially for Wii owners hungry for something beyond Party Babyz or Mario/Sonic Minigame Olympics, Deadly Creatures is worth a play.

For amazing presentation, a unique setting, and convincingly animalistic animation… but hampered with overdone motion controls and the odd visual glitch… Deadly Creatures for Wii gets 3.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts. I’d really like to give it a 4 just for being full of badass spiders.

Deadly Creatures was released February 2009 (NA) for Wii.
Rated T