SpiderHeck tries to pull off the childish dream of giving spiders over the top weapons – especially lightsabers – while letting you swing from wall to wall in arena style combat. With its influences clear – mainly Star Wars, Spider-Man …
SpiderHeck tries to pull off the childish dream of giving spiders over the top weapons – especially lightsabers – while letting you swing from wall to wall in arena style combat.
With its influences clear – mainly Star Wars, Spider-Man with a touch of Smash Bros – this is a fun if quite simple experience that has just enough legs in multiplayer to keep you mildly entertained.
SpiderHeck’s main focus is definitely local multiplayer. Dropping you into the main menu – which acts as an arena itself – the first thing you see is the bold glowing game title and instructions to add extra players.
You’re then greeted with a control map to explore and get used to the controls. There are weapons, hazards and platforms laying around, with the menu acting as a smart little guide to get used to things – especially if you are swinging around with friends at the same time.
To start a game you gracefully land your spider on one of the labelled platforms and wait for about 3 seconds. There are four different game platforms and one extra for customisations to your spider – quick match, versus battle, wave survival and tiers of heck. All of these are self explanatory, with tiers of heck acting almost as an extra challenge mode for the game’s different weapons.
Tiers of heck along with wave survivor are the only modes for the single player – so playing with friends or online is almost a must to get anything out of SpiderHeck.
Controlling your spider can take some time to get used to – we recommend playing with friends first as it removes some of the frustration and keeps things entertaining. At first it feels like you are constantly flying into hazards and enemy fire – basically everywhere you don’t want to go. But with more play time you slowly get to grips with the mechanics and the way the spider feels.
Once you pull off your first few stylish kills – especially against friends- it feels fantastic…even if it takes a while to get there.
Visually SpiderHeck is clean and simple, but does feel very basic. Maps follow the same style, only offering differences in layouts and colour – it can often feel like you are playing the same map over and over, just in a different colour.
Overall SpiderHeck is a fun multiplayer game. It doesn’t offer anything substantial – especially if you’re playing alone – but it can just about hold its own in a party setting.
