Alien Spidy Review
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The main problem with Enigma Software's Alien Spidy is that it doesn't really belong on anything other than a mobile telephone. It's the kind of forgettable platformer that has been done to death on iOS in particular, and you get the feeling that this was its creators' big idea: create something that most people sell for pennies on iOS, change the venue and charge pounds for it instead. This might have worked if Alien Spidy were any good at all, but it isn't. It really isn't.
You play as an arachnid from outer space - hence the title, see - who crash lands on an unidentified planet, and is then forced to spend its time repeatedly trying to earn three stars by passing through a series of astonishingly dull, headache-inducing, neon-tinged garden environments. It's a platformer of the simplest kind, but despite the loud visual frills (this is a game that's aggressively aimed at pre-teen children) it's often quite unbelievably difficult. There's no penalty for dying and Alien Spidy clearly wants you to die loads: the duration of the campaign is littered with so many difficulty spikes that you wonder if its makers were engaged in a sadistic game of evil one-upmanship.
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When you aren't simply walking from left to right - which you for 80% of the time - you're propelling yourself around on webs, and the physics of the web-slingin is, quite frankly, impressive in the extreme. They are about as close to real life as you can get, with the momentum and length of each web determined by when you choose to deploy it, what angle you're at and how fast you're moving. To accommodate this precision, using the right thumbstick (which you do to direct each web blast) involves the kind of accuracy that's basically super-human. The target of each web is often very small - a flower, usually - and you'll spend an obscene amount of time firing webs that land on either side of it, something which frequently sends you plummeting to your death.​
Ideas are introduced and then abandoned. Moveable blocks come into play before being instantly abandoned. Some enemies can be crushed by your webs, and then those same enemies inexplicably become immune to them five minutes later. There are collectibles which make you jump high, or make you move faster, but their effects last for mere seconds (if that) before you're suddenly returned to the monotonous task of walking (and occasionally jumping) from left to right. Occasionally the game allows you to walk from right to left - please, try to contain your excitement - but don't make the mistake of carelessly grabbing collectibles just because they're there: they all look identical, and some of them aren't friendly. There's even a bit where you're forced to march in between a load of enemies who are all moving in unison. It isn't a gameplay system; you're basically queuing. Does that sound like fun?
Presentation is universally sloppy, the game plagued by lengthy load times and sudden freezes, made all the more irritating by the fact that the average smart phone could probably run this without a battery. But the most crushing problem is this one: Alien Spidy just isn't any fun to play. In its own promotional blurb, Alien Spidy is described as being, "easy to pick up, and difficult to master" when in fact this statement is far closer to the truth: Alien Spidy is hard to pick up and impossible to master.
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2/10
Review By Chet Roivas
