Anyone that’s played Heave Ho will know that swinging is much more fun when you do it with friends, and while that game meant you had to be in the same room for your foursome (threesomes and a simple two-person coupling are also an option), Heave Ho 2 now lets you do it online.
There’s no more awkward solo mode in Heave Ho 2 because of this, though there’s a small cachet of players who did enjoy a bit of alone time with the original. Instead you have to play Heave Ho 2 with at least one other person, whether that’s locally, or teaming up in either private and public lobbies.
At its heart, this is the same game, a physics puzzle platformer where you grab onto things and use a video gamey version of physics and momentum to either swing yourself to the next thing to grab or to fling yourself through the air and hope you’ve got your timing right. All you need to know is that you move your arms and body in the direction you’re pointing with the left analogue stick, and you then grab with the left and right triggers for your respective hands. Not having independent arms does take a little getting used to, and it can take mental effort to remember which colour-coded hand is which, but the controls are kept very straight forward.
Sounds simple, right? Well, it’s abject chaos with four people all grappling each other, climbing across one another, trying to remember to grab and release with the correct hand, and also deliberately messing around for a laugh. It’s more restrained in two player, but there’s still just as much opportunity for tomfoolery.
When you do actually work together, though, managing to hold hands, coordinating where you’re going and aligning your momentum to swing back and forth, it works beautifully well. There’s always little side objectives, many of which are to grab an item and take it to the finish, and once we realised we could put it in the middle of our person chain, it suddenly made an awful lot of sense.
All of this is, of course, the same core gameplay as the original, but where Heave Ho 2 really excels is how it mixes things up with new settings and different tasks. Even within the first setting of the mountains and ski slopes, there’s short and pithy puzzles that mix with an end level that’s a full-blown mountain climbing platformer, but jumping to the second set sees you puzzling through an art gallery, searching for hidden keys, arranging statues and more. That’s followed up by a full-blown space adventure in zero-G, piloting a space ship with four thrusters and exploring some cartoony horror vibes, indulging in some medieval themed nonsense, and a neon disco with bounce pads and ladders that defy all notions of Newtonian physics.
Really the only world that outstayed its welcome was the kitchen, with a bit too much of the item grabbing and dragging needed to make chicken burgers, fried eggs and all the rest. Moving heavy items is always a struggle, and this leaned too heavily on this idea.
If you want something a bit more obviously antagonistic, then there’s the Showdown mode, stringing together quickfire games of survival, racing to an objective and battle. There’s jet packs, pop guns, laser swords and more, and it’s a great way to let loose and de-stress.
