Some people get shocked by bugs. Me, I'm just shocked that I liked this game as much as I did.

Deadly Creatures is an action game released for the Wii where you take control of a tarantula and a scorpion in the Mojave Desert off Route 66, using their abilities to survive fierce combat encounters with other bugs and reptiles. While they do this, we follow two human characters, played by Billy Bob Thornton and the late Dennis Hopper, searching the desert for a hidden treasure. Between the thrill of the combat and the twists of the story following the two treasure hunters, Deadly Creatures offers a lot to intrigue players.

Throughout the adventure, you play as both a tarantula and a scorpion, switching between the two with each passing stage. There's 10 stages total, so you get to play as both creatures an equal amount of time, allowing the player to be fully immersed in each creature's unique play style.

The tarantula is agile, being able to jump high in the air to dodge attacks and zip to nearby webs. Combat-wise, the tarantula is all about setups. When you unlock the ability to shoot web at enemies, this becomes your go-to way to retaliate against foes. While they're webbed, you can go in for a quick combo or pounce on them, injecting them with a lethal poison. I feel that you have a lot of creative freedom with how you play the tarantula, and figuring out combat strategies to take advantage of stunned foes is highly satisfying.

The scorpion is slow and bulky, but they are very versatile with their pincers and stinger. They're more combo-focused, punishing enemies with their pincers and ending combos with stinger strikes. Exclusive to the scorpion are finishing moves. When an enemy is weak, you'll get a prompt to begin a finishing quick-time event (I'll be referring to these as QUE's from here on out). By swinging the controllers as the prompts show up, you'll be able to finish off enemies stylishly while also regaining some health. The developers were also merciful enough to give no penalty for failing a QTE outside of having to re-do the finisher. The finishing moves are all really cool, by the way. You'll have some where you slam an enemy into the ground and then dig your pincers into them, or you'll flip them over and shove your stinger down their throat. It's way cooler than it has any right to be.

If I had to pick a favorite playstyle, it would have to be the tarantula. As much as I like the combos and finishers of the scorpion, being able to dance around foes and punish them by webbing them up and following with powerful moves was always a thrill.

Now, you don't have all of these moves from the beginning. You unlock moves by gaining points, which are earned from defeating enemies and completing story objectives. Earn enough points and you automatically unlock more moves to try out in combat. It's very simple and non-intrusive. Outside of that, as you explore stages you'll find grubs, which unlock galleries full of cool concept art, as well as leaf crickets, which will increase your health when you find enough of them.

You encounter a decent variety of enemies in this game, each with their own abilities that they'll use to try to assert their place in the food chain. Outside of regular enemies, boss encounters are scarce, with there only being a small handful of them in the game. You also get to have rival matches between the scorpion and the tarantula, which gets exciting as you play, since after a while you know how they both work, and now have to figure out how you're going to counter their cool moves.

As much as I enjoyed this game, I do have some criticisms to raise. Firstly, the subtitles. In the options menu you can enable subtitles to help you follow along with what the human characters are saying. Sadly, though, these aren't always present. There are a handful of dialogue exchanges that just aren't subtitled, and it's a shame because it makes you feel like you're missing pieces of the story while the sounds of exploration and combat are happening.

My other complaints stem from this game being both a 7th Gen game and being released on the Wii. Firstly, as with many 7th Gen games at the time of this game's release, the framerate is highly inconsistent, dipping very low during many enemy encounters. This can be frustrating, especially as this effects your inputs. Games just feel less responsive when running poorly, and sadly Deadly Creatures suffers because of this. It's not game-breaking, but it is annoying.

Lastly, we need to talk about the motion controls. You're going to be pointing the wiimote at the screen for things like lining up web shots and zipping to other webs as the tarantula, which feels fine. What doesn't feel fine is when you're playing as the scorpion and you need to use motion controls for finishers. Maybe it's because my wiimotes are over 15 years old at this point, but following the prompts to move the wiimote and nunchuk for finishers feels so broken. I'll do the moves and unless I'm waving them wildly in the directions they want, they aren't going to register. It becomes infuriating when you're doing the same moves over and over again and they aren't reading to allow you to finish QTEs. There's also motion controls involved in moves outside QTEs, like combo finishers for the scorpion and follow-up moves for the tarantula. The scorpion also has environment traversal moves that require you to waggle the controllers. It's exhausting after a while, and I feel that it kinda brings down the game slightly.

Overall, I loved this game. I enjoyed following the plot of the treasure hunters, I loved playing as the tarantula and scorpion, and I greatly enjoyed checking out the concept art I unlocked, as well as interviews with Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper where they talk about the game and their interest in bugs and reptiles. However, outside of the arachnophobia that some players may suffer from, there are barriers to the experience, such as the framerate issues and motion control implementation. It's probably a long-shot, but I would really like to see this game get a remaster one day that fixes the issues I had. Being able to use button presses in place of the motion controls, having a stable framerate and having consistent subtitles would absolutely bring this game up immensely.

If you don't have arachnophobia and are cool with virtual bug antics, then I highly recommend this game. You'll be humming Devil Trigger from Devil May Cry 5 while stinging bad bugs where the sun don't shine before you know it.

My spooky season wouldn’t be complete without some Wii jank thrown into the mix. Granted, Deadly Creatures is by no means a straight horror title, but my first two Wii picks in Escape from Bug Island and Calling were unfortunately a bit painful to play through, so my third pick will have to do! In this game, you alternate between controlling a tarantula and a scorpion, navigating the Sonoran Desert while fighting off local wildlife such as rats, gila monsters, an angry rattlesnake, and of course, one another. The majority of these levels are linear romps through dark tunnels and buried human garbage, and as the player progresses, they’ll also unlock additional abilities such as a silk-web grapple for the tarantula and a slash for the scorpion that lets you cut down tall grass barriers. Most distinct to Deadly Creatures, however, is the ability to creep up walls (and in the case of the tarantula, eventually walk and cling onto ceilings), which allows the player to more easily weave through the chaotic obstacle courses as well as better convey the intricate and vast micro-environments scattered throughout the Sonoran Desert.

That said, Deadly Creatures' biggest draw is its combat. Throughout the game, local fauna relentlessly assault the player as they intrude upon their territory. These scores of gritty and grueling close-quarters encounters remind me heavily of Cubivore’s combat; the player is often forced to contend with multiple foes at a time in claustrophobic settings, and while it’s not particularly complex (classic bait-and-punish using the scorpion’s dash/block and the tarantula’s jump defensively before striking back), enemies can punish complacent players quite heavily with stun-locking thrusts while surrounding the player to corner them into unfavorable situations. The obligatory waggle controls for several of the stronger/better-ranged attacks further accentuate the tense fights, and are a rare case where I can at least appreciate the implementation of Wii motion control QTEs considering how much fun it is to slam rats and beetles into the dirt as part of the scorpion's "execution moves."

The downside then, is that the game wears out its novelty fairly quickly, and concurrently, the external circumstances fail to necessitate any additional player experimentation that could otherwise provide significant changes in gameplay. Enemy differentiation and AI are huge culprits: while there are a variety of different hostile creatures thrown at the player, the fairly barebones AI and general lack of different enemy attacks means that the same bread-and-butter strategies can be abused regardless of the exact situation. In particular, the tarantula can spam the quick jump attack while the scorpion can simply block single attacks before stabbing every vulnerable foe to death. Alternatively, the player can abuse the standard attack combo to trap foes in eternal hitstun, which by itself can trivialize the majority of the game’s encounters. Even though the player creatures unlock more attacks over time, there’s never any incentive to try them out because button mashing is all that the player needs even at the highest difficulty to win almost every encounter. As a result, the game’s fights never really get harder, but instead become longer by throwing more enemies in a row during single encounters or relying upon spongier foes that now take a half-minute of mashing to finish off. The sole exceptions here are the enemy horned lizards, but they are even more laborious to fight because they spend so much time blocking hits rather than proactively endangering the player with their own attacks. The optimal method is to bait the lizard to charge at you and immediately strike them after dodging (or if using the scorpion, try and get close enough for a Burrow Strike), but this can take a solid minute or so if the enemy AI does not cooperate and instead spends its time meandering about and defending whenever you approach instead.

This eventual slog of enemy encounters is all on top of the slew of strange technical issues and design decisions that slowly but surely bleed the game to death by a thousand cuts. The most intrusive problem is the persistent stuttering and mid-level loading throughout the game’s runtime that slow exploration and combat to a literal crawl. The disorienting camera also becomes a liability, thanks to the very narrow FOV that doesn’t automatically rotate around if the player character turns and walks towards the camera’s source. In a mostly flat 3D game like Cubivore, a lack of full camera control is not as problematic when only one vertical angle for an isometric perspective is really required. However, in a fully 3D action-adventure game like Deadly Creatures where the player needs to see how the world warps around them while walking up/down walls, the lack of camera control is far more egregious, especially when the camera constantly gets uncomfortably close to the player model (often pointing down towards the ground so you can’t see approaching enemies) and at times, gets caught or stuck on walls. Then, there’s the usual layer of 2000s era jank surrounding this with strange object geometry collision, enemy/player models getting stuck on edges and vertices, seemingly random invisible walls, indistinguishable unclimbable surfaces, and so much more. I can certainly tolerate any of these issues in isolation, but together, they form this onslaught of sheer struggle that absolutely wore me out. If the game's length was cut in half, then it’d be a much easier recommendation: after all, the game stops giving you new traversal toys to play with by the halfway point and the actual level design itself never noticeably branches out. As it stands though, you’ll need more than just a penchant for stretched-out textures and 3D polygonal jank to really get something out of this distinct yet sadly tedious experiment forever stuck in its time.