Insert Ian Malcolm quote here.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect upon booting up Spidersaurs, a WayForward game that originally appeared as a launch title for Apple Arcade, but I was still surprised by what I got: a brightly-colored Contra game featuring all manner of bizarre dinosaur/arthropod hybrids and a level of difficulty that I was wholly unprepared for. Spidersaurs is fun but edges into frustrating territory here and there.
The story is barebones: The InGest Corporation, in attempting to solve world hunger, has successfully cloned dinosaurs, but instead of creating a “biological preserve” that “will drive the kids out of their minds,” they decide to fill in the gaps in their DNA strands with insect genes instead of frog genes. The resulting horrendous hybrids, perhaps too nightmarish to display to the public, are utilized to end world hunger (somehow). The game’s opening animation is extremely charming and I fully endorse the company’s name–a clear parody of Jurassic Park’s InGen. Well, as is inevitable, the monsters escape and it’s up to InGest’s two unpaid interns–Victoria and Adrian–to wipe out the Spidersaur threat.
Spidersaurs can be played solo or with a friend (locally). Victoria and Adrian have the same moveset but utilize different weapons, which I was pleasantly surprised by. The two run and gun through several short–but very difficult–side-scrolling levels, fighting midbosses and proper bosses, and swapping or upgrading their weaponry along the way. If you’ve been itching for a follow-up to WayForward’s 2007 Contra 4 for DS, your prayers have been answered, in all that implies.
Victoria and Adrian die after taking three hits, and health pickups are exceedingly rare. As they progress through the game, they learn new moves like climbing walls or hanging from ceilings, double jumping, and grappling to vertical handholds that give them a lot of mobility in later areas, to the point where the level design didn’t really account for much of it. As in Contra, dying also kills your weapon upgrades, so repeatedly buying the farm during a boss fight just makes the boss progressively harder. In fact, Spidersaurs is hard enough on normal difficulty that I was eventually inspired (maybe “crestfallen”) to start a new save file on easy–you can’t change the difficulty level mid-game. This did not come at any significant cost, though, because each individual level is maybe ten minutes long, which seems like the perfect length. Defeating the mid-boss in each stage (usually pretty doable, although one critter in particular became a huge thorn in my side) activates a checkpoint, which I definitely needed sometimes, even on easy.
Despite its intimidating difficulty, Spidersaurs is a treat to look at, with WayForward’s character design and animation talents on full display. I’m sure you can all guess that I immediately fell in love with Victoria (I’m going through a “Gwen from Total Drama Island” phase). Adrian’s no slouch himself in the animation department, and I actually found myself preferring his unique weapons (flamethrower, baby). The enemy characters are generally pretty simplistic, but that speaks to the Contra inspiration–they’re all immediately recognizable, so you know how to approach them. Boss characters get more personality: I really liked the puppeteer bosses, whose panicked expressions never failed to make me chuckle. A couple have more than one phase, which you’ll either love or hate. The music is also top-notch, though not as memorable as I’d hoped.
Difficulty aside, I have some minor gripes with the game: it’s very hard to play competently in Handheld mode because every character, enemy, pickup, and bullet is already very small. If you, like me, want to appreciate the art design and also not miss any stray enemy shots, play this game on your TV. I’m also torn on Spidersaurs’ dedication to emulating classic Contra. You’ve got the means–why not change things up a little? I would’ve loved to see a way to aim precisely a la Metroid Dread, or unique weapons that weren’t clear homages to old run-and-gun standards. While I liked the expanding moveset, the level design rarely took full advantage. Finally, and this is extremely nitpicky, I would have loved to see a gallery that showed the characters in different poses, or concept art, or something. Victoria adopts a super cool pose when she gets a new power that I adore, but her sprite is so small, I was never able to fully appreciate it.
For the Contra diehards among you, Spidersaurs is a great game. The difficulty can be brutal at times, but I’m sure I’ll power through the higher tiers eventually.
