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.