THQ Wii Showcase

Deadly Creatures

• Developer - Rainbow Studios
• Release date - 2008

On paper, Deadly Creatures sounds like it might be terrific: a game where you play as a spider or a scorpion, and get into fights. Except it mainly sounds like this if you imagine it on videogamey paper, where both creatures are anthropomorphised into colourful, Yoshi-esque caricatures, perhaps fighting some sort of evil pesticide chairman with a big moustache on the moon or inside a volcano, and where you upgrade your eyes by collecting concealed hats.

The reality, at least at THQ Gamers Day, was a bit different, and to be fair very obviously unfinished. The action-orientated scorpion gameplay being shown involved using the nunchuk to crawl around in dusty caverns full of massive dusty skeletons and half-buried dusty green bottles, or a public convenience borrowed from Trainspotting.

The fighting involves locking on with A, then stabbing at enemy wolf spiders and bugs with your claws by pressing B, flicking up on the Wii remote to use your venomous stinger, and blocking with C. When you've reduced an enemy's health sufficiently, you can grab them by pressing Z and B at the same time, and then follow on-screen prompts for moving both hands up and down to slam them to death.

You can also unlock a tail whip move, activated by swinging the Wiimote from side to side, and a digging move. It's not clear what happens as the gameplay and levels develop, but there's some semblance of having to explore as you can climb on certain walls, which switches the perspective a bit. In the demo, this was used to highlight a giant spider grappling a lizard in a nearby web.

It's also worth pointing out that in the amazing din of the flashy THQ Gamers Day, it was impossible to make out what was going on with the audio, so the reactive soundtrack and supposedly atmospheric effects were lost on us.

We also got to fight a tarantula at the end. Which was nice. We've always wanted to do that. But conclusions were difficult, if not impossible to draw. The most obvious one though was that the stuttering demo, regularly jerking to a standstill with placeholder menus all over, is probably representative of a game a good few months further away than any of the other fairly finished Wii titles on display. We still like the concept, and hopefully when we next see it in action it will be more complete - and we can get a good look at the stealthy tarantula sections as well.