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Sorry for the long Hiatus. Some things have changed around recently at work and my computer time has been greatly diminished. On the plus side though my gaming time has been significantly increased!! With my new game time I've been catching up on my Wii backlog. This has been great because I’ve been neglecting several titles for far too long. One of the games that really jumped out at me was Deadly Creatures.

The cover art doesn’t do much to sell the appeal of the game. It looks like something you'd pick up for your 7 year old that loves collecting bugs. I can honestly say though that Deadly Creatures had one of the most interesting stories I've ever come across in a game. It wasn’t that the story was especially unique. It wasn’t. It wasn’t that it had a mind bending twist. It didn’t. It was interesting because of the way that it was told.

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The first feather in the Rainbow Studios cap is the fact that they recruited some actual actors for the voice talent. The story revolves around two southern hill-billies, inheriting a map with the location of a lost civil war treasure. The voice of the rednecks is played by none other than Billy Bob Thorton and Dennis Hopper. Fantastic casting for such roles, wouldn’t you agree?

So the only characters that speak throughout the game are the two humans mentioned above. The thing is that the two characters that you get to play as are a Spider and a Scorpion. These two animals have their own unique plots to follow, but as they adventure along on their own journeys they often find themselves in close proximity to our greedy treasure hunters. So basically as you investigate each area and move forward you unwittingly uncover the story of the civil war treasure hunters as well as get closer to your own goals. It was a pretty cool way to move a plot along.

Aside from the story the gameplay is also pretty solid. If you’re not a fan of "waggle" this isn’t a good title for you. The Scorpion and Spider both have their own unique set of skills that require different movements from the Nunchuck-Wii Remote combo. It can range to flipping the remote up to pounce, jabbing it down to sting with your tail, using the pointer to fire a web, scooping both controller parts to dig through rocks and tons of other moves and combinations of several attacks. Occasionally games with various controller movements can be quite sloppy and either unresponsive or have an unintended response. That wasn’t an issue with Deadly Creatures. The controls were extremely polished and not once did I have any control issues when in battle.

The camera on the other hand to a little getting used to at the start. I never quite got used to it, but it functioned well enough that it wasn’t a hindrance. The only time it was a real annoyance was during some upside-down Spider web-crawling parts.

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Another neat aspect of the game was the scale of the environments. During fights it’s pretty easy to forget just how small you are, but when traversing the sizable area in each level they did a fantastic job of keeping you feeling quite insignificant. For instance just working your way through/around an old truck takes several minutes and requires you to navigate through areas unreachable by a human. A single room in a house is massive and takes a surprising amount of effort to wander through.

The game is fairly short and unless you enjoy fetching items (ala Assassin's Creed, but not quite as bad as flag collecting), there isn’t much for replay value. By collecting grubs throughout the game you'll unlock large archives of concept artwork for the game. Right off the get go you'll have access to an interview with each voice actor along with some video of them recording their parts. An entertaining few minutes each.

Deadly Creatures isn’t something that'll likely go down as a cult classic, but it’s unique and interesting enough to keep a spot in any Wii collection. If you can find a copy for less than $15 I think you'll find it was money well spent.

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