So here is the story: After losing contact with his explorer friend Virgi, our fearless alien hero Spidy heads to Earth in his spacecraft to find her. While entering the Earth’s atmosphere, his spacecraft suddenly fails and starts to break up, causing Spidy to crash-land on the strange planet, with his craft scattered across forests, throughout ponds and in dark caves. Spidy finds himself alone on an alien world and faces the epic challenge of tracking down Virgi, battling strange new enemies and finding the missing pieces from his spacecraft in order to repair the damage and make their escape home.
Alien Spidy would be a very nice addition to any Steam library. When they said stunning visuals they meant it. The glowing atmosphere reminded me of a bit of CreaVures, but it’s all well and good to have a pretty game to look at but what about the actual gameplay?
Naturally Alien Spidy takes you through some training levels to teach you the basics of the gameplay, movement, points, powerups. scoring etc. It is a quick tutorial so it’s not long before you’re out there on your own searching for this “friend”. I think there is something more going on there with Spidy and Virgi, I mean can boy spiders and girl spiders really just be friends and nothing else?
The controls in Alien Spidy are pretty straightforward using a combination of the mouse and keyboard to move jump, spit out your sticky web stuff. My apologies, I was never into Spiderman, I’m not sure if you call it ejecting your web but that sounds a little rude to me. Either way the controls are simple to learn but very very hard to master. Getting from one end of a level to another is a task in itself, but gathering all the powerups and avoiding the nasties takes some serious skill and practice.
Thankfully each level is littered with checkpoints so you’ll never be put too far back when you inevitably encounter a danger to Spidy. He’s a fragile little fellow, will respawn if he is touched by water and other more obvious nasties, but can indeed fall great depths with no harm. If you are going for a fuller run collecting all available points then you can choose to respawn manually, however doing this will result in points deducted at the end of the level depending on how many times you use this feature. They really want you to perfect your playthrough. Frustratingly silly mistakes will leave you with the just one more shot mentality. Wildly swinging throughout the level, sometimes you wonder how you ever made it to the end. If you are frustrated easily then perhaps this game will enrage you, but if you enjoy a challenge then Alien Spidy provides some outrageously hectic moments.
If any of your Steam buddies are also playing Alien Spidy then you will see at the end of each level a friends score in comparison to your own, just a little more nudging to improve. If getting to the end of a level wasn’t incentive enough, you’ll have Spidy waiting for you flexing his muscles which is quite adorable, for a spider I mean.
Along with catchy music I think Alien Spidy has enough replay incentive to keep you coming back, because you know you can do that level better than last time, you just know it, even if it takes you all night. Steam achievements are also present if you’re into those too.
I checked the Steam store today and Alien Spidy is on sale. While in my opinion it’s worth it’s full price, we all like a bargain, so get yourself to Steam and get this now.
8 out of 10