REVIEW: ‘SpiderHeck’ is a Heck of a Good Time (XSX)

SpiderHeck is a physics-based brawler by developer Neverjam and published by tinyBuild. In this straightforward but increasingly challenging game, you play as a spider who takes arms against waves of enemies in one of two challenge modes, Wave Survival and Tiers of Heck, or against other spiders in Versus Battle.

There are only so many things you can control in SpiderHeck: movement, jumping, swinging from spiderwebs, picking up weapons, aiming them, and firing or throwing them. That’s it. But for as simplistic as the controls are, the gameplay is tough to master. Foremost, the gravity of swinging around the game’s floating platforms, walking around on them on any side, and dodging enemies, projectiles, and going out of bounds takes practice to nail. It’s not a game that throws you into a bullet hell deep end instantly or anything like that. You’ll get a slowly increasing difficulty in either mode, but it will take a good bit of practice to get the movement down just right.

When you do, though, it will feel really good. The gravity is entirely fair, aiming is spot-on, and the array of different weapons makes sure that your movement is varied too. You can’t just camp out in a corner with a laser sword. Your weapons have limited uses, radiuses, and power. Some gun weapons will fire one blast at a time but give you more ammo, while others will fire huge, wide bursts but only give you two shots. Physical weapons have different ranges too, and you’ll have to constantly keep on your toes to pick up new ones or even swap out for something more practical for handling the enemy type at hand.

Enemies aren’t super diverse, but they’re definitely diverse enough that you’ll be switching up your tactics on their account frequently. They also gain additional armor and take more hits to take out as you go along, rather than just increasing the number of enemies on screen at a time. Whether playing through Wave Survival to reach the highest wave you can or trying the challenge maps of Tiers of Heck, you’ll feel like many of your rounds are spent on trial and error to find the best tactic to take on enemies with what weapons you have, what map you’re on, and what playstyle you lean towards.

In Wave Survival, you start with three lives and gain one back plus some kind of perk for every level you pass. Perks can slow down time when using swords, increase bomb blast radii, give you one extra hit on your last life, and a number of other useful things. The mode feels well-balanced as you go from early into later rounds. Tiers of Heck is a challenge mode where pre-determined maps, weapons, sets of enemies, and other conditions challenge you to clear three waves. I enjoyed this mode both as practice for different scenarios in Wave Survival and as its own challenge. It never felt like I was just plowing through the levels; I had to try and retry many of them to figure out how to slay certain enemies with certain weapons that would not necessarily have been my first choices.

Victory is not without some reward. As you play, you’ll unlock different hats for your spider. They’re fun for your own sake and can help you stand out when playing locally or online with others. Up to four players can play at once in either scenario, which only adds to the level of chaos. Multiplayer isn’t available in Tiers of Heck, but it’s key to advancing farther in Wave Survival. You can also brawl it out in Versus Battle mode. The more the merrier here, as one-on-one play isn’t especially interesting as more than practice. You will spend less time here than in co-op, certainly.

Audio-visually, SpiderHeck is as straightforward as its gameplay. It’s a dampened neon heckscape with soft metal music in the background. It’s not fire and brimstone, which I suppose makes sense given we’re in heck here, not hell. I actually appreciate that it’s softer around the edges on both the audio and visual sides. It’s less abrasive to look at than if the neons were bright, and the tone feels chaotic rather than intense. It’s too simple a game to warrant much higher octane than that.

SpiderHeck is a fun, chaotic new addition to the action indie lineup. It works as both a single-player and multiplayer experience and is certainly unlike any other games of its type in how it uses the gravity of swinging from spiderwebs and sticking to surfaces for great 360-degree action.

SpiderHeck is available on Playstation, Nintendo Switch, and PC, as well as on September 22.