Game Reviews

Bug Heroes 2

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| Bug Heroes 2
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Bug Heroes 2
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| Bug Heroes 2

There's just something fun about charging a group of scuttling mites as a gnashing spider warrior. Swinging your shield into squidgy faces, your trusty ladybird companion slashing with its rapier behind you, you plough through the attack, grab a chunk of food, and scuttle back to your base.

That's the basic rhythm of Bug Heroes 2. You'll charge in, take a bit of a beating while you grab food to heal yourself with and spare parts to reinforce your base with, then return to your food stash to deposit your items and make sure no one's causing any kerfuffle.

You'll earn experience and cash to spend on new skills and weapons, turning your two-creepy-crawly kill team into a veritable stumbling wall of death.

It's not without its little niggles, and here and there it's rough around the edges, but that scrappy core means there's always something for you to enjoy.

Insect spray

The game is a mix of third-person action and base defence. You take to the field as a team of two bugs with different skills. Some use ranged weapons, some deal damage with swords, others are hulking brutes that soak up hits and protect their partner.

You've only got a couple to choose from to begin with, but as you play through the game you'll unlock more, giving you a wide variety of team-up options. Finding the right balance for the way you want to play is key to battling back the advancing hordes.

The levels in the campaign mode have a variety of different challenges. You might need to defend your base for a set amount of time, knock back a set number of waves, or take the attack to the enemy and capture some command points.

You control your duo with an invisible stick on the bottom-left of the screen and a series of buttons near the edge. These let you use the special powers you accrue as you fight, swap between your bugs, and change the camera angle.

Of the two camera options the zoomed-out one offers the best view, with the closer, over-the-shoulder angle making it difficult to see anything but the bugs you're bashing.

Bugged out

There's a risk and reward bounce to the game. You know you want to get out there and force the issue, but at the same time leaving your base exposed can result in a desperate race back before it's overwhelmed.

Skirmish mode sees you controlling your bugs one at a time, arranging an army of grubs and towers so you can defeat an opposing force before they get a chance to smash up your defences and steal your food.

Multiplayer games offer a variety of different modes, including one where you take control of half of a bug team, joining forces with a friend to take on another team of two in a battle to the death.

Online players are a little on the thin side, but you can team up with real people with local networking if you've all got copies of the game.

Bug bomb

Bug Heroes 2 has a decent chunk of action for you to sink your teeth into, although it's sometimes presented in a slightly muddled way. There are a lot of menus, and a lot of different mechanics for progression that sometimes seem to butt up against each other.

Still, there's enough fun here that you can look past the niggles and just enjoy yourself. It's not particularly deep, it's not particularly original, but there's enough bug-on-bug violence that you can't really complain.

Bug Heroes 2

A slightly scattered action game with an interesting strategic sideline, Bug Heroes 2 gets a little lost in itself sometimes, but it's still worth a crack
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.