Game Reviews

Greedy Spiders

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Greedy Spiders
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| Greedy Spiders

With their spindly legs and freaky ability to dangle right in front of your eyes when you’re watching TV, spiders will never be nature’s most beloved creatures.

Fortunately, Blyts Mobile’s smart little puzzler Greedy Spiders should do something to enhance their (currently lower than Nick Clegg) PR image, thanks to its light-hearted style and deceptively taxing puzzles.

Cut the web

Combining those 'just one more go' addictive properties with the cartoony characters and star rating system in much the same way as Cut the Rope and Angry Birds, Greedy Spiders tasks you with rescuing helpless flies trapped in a web.

The only way to pull this off and thereby prevent the rapacious arachnids tucking in is to either snip away at the crisscrossing web to cut the spider completely off, or to free every fly by snipping the web strands holding them in place.

Gameplay has more than a dash of turn-based combat about it: you get one chop for each space of movement by the spider and its pals (often two or three appear in levels at once).

While the tap-to-cut mechanic employed in Greedy Spiders to snip the strands is undoubtedly less fun than Cut the Rope-style swiping, it does means there's less margin for error as the webs get bigger and more intricate.

Since one munch means Game Over, though, the difficulty soon takes a sharp upward turn. You'll spend a lot of time staring at the screen calculating complex spider paths and agonising over whether the best tactic is defence (snipping strands connecting flies) or offence (trying to trap the creepy crawlies by carefully snipping off their routes).

Ruthless arachnids

If you can handle Greedy Spiders's ruthless difficulty curve, you're gradually rewarded with power-ups to aid your rescue mission. Flames, for example, can wipe out large areas of web, while Dummy Spiders can temporarily trick enemies into heading the wrong way.

However, new spider types, such as ones that behave unpredictably, or don’t fall for tricks (identified by their different shapes and markings), mean the game constantly provides a stern test of your puzzle prowess.

And once you start relying on repetitive trial and error, and endless taps of the Undo and Restart buttons, the game loses some of its endearing, fun-focused charm.

Greedy Spiders is still a brain-tickling treat, but later worlds risk becoming more of a chore than a challenge for casual players.

Greedy Spiders

Greedy Spiders is a cheerful yet seriously challenging puzzler
Score
Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo