Seemingly aimed at gamers around my age, Spidersaurs gets going by bursting out the traps in a flurry of Saturday morning kid’s TV nostalgia right from the opening cutscene. The music, animation and narration is spot on, reminding of simpler times where being up early on a weekend morning was a joy (instead of a necessity to get to work). I’ll leave you to figure out how old this observation makes me.
The dinosaur-spider hybrid creatures known as Spidersaurs have broken loose and are running amok causing chaos, which means two taste-testers are asked to step up and sort stuff out. In a cheeky nod to Jurassic Park, InGest Corp have created these nightmarish creatures in a bid to end world hunger by providing a steady supply of meat to the people. Despite all this, I still don’t quite understand how this led to cross breeding spiders and dinosaurs, but let’s just accept that and move on.
Spidersaurs is a run ‘n gun platformer, and starts off by putting you through a fairly relaxed tutorial. At first, your abilities are limited to running, jumping and shooting. However, as you conquer each zone and defeat the boss at the end, eating their remains will grant you a new ability. These turn out to be pretty standard platformer tropes such as a dash or double jump.
You’ll start with a pea shooter, but will get regular opportunities to upgrade your weapons through random drops that appear mid stage. However, if you take damage you will forfeit any upgrades, and if you lose a life you will revert back to your most basic weapons. Extra lives can be picked up by scoring points as you blast your way through the stages.
As soon as you enter the game proper, post-tutorial, the action suddenly becomes frantic. There’s no hand holding as waves of the hybrid nasties begin to descend, each with different movement and firing patterns. It’s pretty challenging in parts, and borderline frustrating in others.
This is mainly because the controls can be a little iffy, the mapping doesn’t feel totally comfortable. Occasionally a jump won’t be registered, causing you to take damage. However, my biggest gripe is that you can only shoot in one of eight distinct directions, which means you lack the accuracy to take out Spidersaurs until you move into the right position or risk them getting close enough to you.
This isn’t a problem in itself, in fact it’s a hallmark of this type of platformer. However, due to the nasty critters running around everywhere, the action would flow better without the need to continually jostle into position to land a shot, because it’s hard enough keeping them at bay in the first place. What doesn’t help is that you seem to move painfully slow compared to the Spidersaurs, so evading them is very difficult (until you unlock the dash ability which makes things slightly easier).
One thing Spidersaurs absolutely nails is its theme. Interesting and detailed creature designs are backed up with an energetic and sometimes frantic soundtrack. This is especially apparent with the boss battles, which are well designed, but these larger nasties can take a fair bit of punishment before they kick the bucket.
There are five in total and a final boss fight to get through, which doesn’t equate to that much playtime overall (unless you die a lot). Although the gameplay is fairly repetitive, it doesn’t become an issue due to the main adventure’s short runtime. You can tackle it with a friend too if you wish, and choose from the three usual difficulties.
Once you beat the main game, Arcade and Speedrun Modes are unlocked. These are slight variations to the same set of levels, such as having all your abilities from the start. In all honesty, they weren’t different enough to compel me to play the game again straight away. Once through was certainly enough for the time being.
Spidersaurs is rather expensive for what’s on offer, and if I’m being brutally honest when all is said and done it is a pretty average platformer despite its stylistic edge. For £16.74 I’d expect much more longevity from a game which does not rely on replay value, instead offering more fresh content.
Spidersaurs is a short, frantic game which struggles to do enough to nail down any replayability value. It does offer solid, challenging platforming action, albeit at a pretty steep price.
Spidersaurs is available from the Xbox Store
