Alien Spidy is the brand new action platformer from developer Enigma SP and publisher Kalypso Media Digital. The back story sees the main character Spidy journey to Earth in search for his friend Virgi, whom he has lost contact with. Spidy must travel through the 2D/3D world, past many dangers, to track Virgi down. Will Alien Spidy be a platformer for everyone to enjoy or will gamers’ time be better spent on the web?
Let’s find out and kick off the HOTs and NOTs.
HOTs
Presentation
Alien Spidy has artistic style that catches and draws the eye. The 2D/3D world is visually pleasing with its cartoon style. Bold colours are used perfectly to signify the safe and dangerous places and this thoroughly needed when racing through levels, attempting to get a highscore. Drawing the player into the animated world the early levels treats players to a distinctive platformer; it’s a shame that later levels won’t be appreciated as much.
Simple Tutorial
Rather than throwing players into the deep end straight away Alien Spidy features a few rather handy tutorial levels. The tutorial levels teach you the basics of the game, that gamers will have to master for later levels. How to move, swinging, what to avoid, power-ups, points and combos are all simply explained over a number of different levels. Don’t be fooled by these levels; the game isn’t an easy one and these tutorial levels are only there to give players the basics and a feel for the game.
Feeling of Accomplishment
With most platformers, especially recent Mario titles, after completing a level the player will get some sense of accomplishment but not to the same level as Alien Spidy. After only a few levels past the tutorial players should be able to see the direction the game is going to take. Rather than being a just a simple platformer it becomes mostly about maintaining momentum through a level.
From the tutorial the moving, swinging and other aspects of Alien Spidy seem quite simple, almost easy, but be warned it ramps up in difficulty quite quickly. It is because of this difficulty that when you do complete a level, you get a huge feeling of accomplishment which is much greater than that of normal platformers. The issue is whether players want to fight through levels, spending half an hour trying to get past just one section, just for the sense that they managed to complete it.
Variation
It doesn’t sound like there is much variation from the tutorials but it is how the basic elements have been added together that creates the variety. For instance, one section will have you running and bouncing along the floor, the next avoiding the spiked floors and finally an area where players must perfectly bounce between spikes on the floor whilst attempting to swing across the ceiling. This is quite a typical approach for games by adding elements together but Alien Spidy manages with this technique to keep every of the 69 levels unique. To aid this there are three visually different themes that go one step further to add variation into the title.
