YMMV / Deadly Creatures

• Cult Classic: It received good-but-not great reviews on release and mostly undersold. These days, it's remembered as a fantastic third-party Wii title that had some cool ideas and great atmosphere and is considered one of the system's hidden gems.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Rats are fast, hit hard, can stunlock you, and almost always show up in groups of at least two. If a rat starts chaining you, you might as well reset. Albino Rats hit even harder, have an HP pool that lets them soak up more damage than their cousins, and have a nasty habit of wandering out of nowhere to ruin your day in the later levels. They have a Weaksauce Weakness to the Scorpion's charge attack, but if you're fighting two, good luck hitting both with it. Fighting them as the Tarantula? Tough luck.
  • Horned Lizards get introduced as bosses (you fight one with the Tarantula at the end of Chapter 5 and have a rematch as the Scorpion in the beginning of Chapter 6) and are thereafter Degraded Bosses, but they're still a nightmare to fight. Hitting them anywhere other than their face is a No-Sell and actually hurts you thanks to the thorns that cover their body, they can turtle to avoid damage altogether, they immediately shrug off getting webbed by the Tarantula—something even rats can't do—and the Scorpion's sting can't penetrate their defenses. They also hit ludicrously hard and can shoot blood at you with annoying accuracy to harass you from across the arena.
• Goddamned Bats: Venom Beetles. Go down in a single hit, but the game has a nasty habit of parking them on the far side of an arena with a big nasty enemy or two there, and they just love to snipe you with venom while you either try to fight the big baddie or book it to them.
• That One Boss:
  • The twofer Sequential Boss of the Horned Lizard followed by the duel with the Tarantula that begins chapter 6. Neither would be that bad on their own, but doing them in succession can be quite difficult, especially if the lizard left you with little health. The Tarantula is the one you play as in the odd chapters, meaning that it's far tougher than others of its species and can perform combos that can shave off whatever health you crawled out of the lizard fight with.
  • Chapter 7 has a bunch of Wolfpack Boss fights, which all contribute to its That One Level nature: a battle against two Albino Rats, a fight with several waves of Wolf Spiders, and a fight with two Horned Lizards. And you have to do this as the Tarantula, which is the protagonist that doesn't specialize in combat.
• That One Level:
  • The sequences where you fall into Widow webs and have to do a series of QTEs to escape. A single failure means game over, and the game sometimes just won't recognize the Wii's waggles as correct. You'll find yourself praying for button prompts and not swipes of the wiimote.
  • The first part of Chapter 4. Checkpoint Starvation rears its ugly head; no checkpoint appears until you beat the lizard minibosses over halfway through the chapter. Scattered around the map before them is a number of tough enemies guarding goodies. Do you book it to the lizards and fight them with max health and miss out on the rewards? Or hunt the rewards down, taking damage that will come back to bite you when you fight the lizards? It's lose-lose either way. And if you die to anything you have to do it all over again.
  • Chapter 7, almost universally regarded as the game's worst. The longest level in the game by far, and throws a lot of combat nastiness when you are playing as the non-combat character: a dollhouse full of widows, several encounters with mantises, more than a few lizards, and no less than three Wolfpack Boss fights which are all contenders for That One Boss. And Checkpoint Starvation is as prevalent here as it was in Chapter 4. Lose to any of the above? Have fun doing huge chunks of the level over again. Including the boss fights.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Word of God refers to both protagonists as male (the tarantula even being given the nickname "Bobby" by the developers), but the Tarantula has the body shape of a female, which are larger than males in Real Life.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The game holds up quite well due to the awesome art direction. Exploring the gorgeous Scenery Gorn of the blasted Sonoran Desert from a bug's-eye view is great, and each level is designed around interesting visual setpieces. Chapter 2 (exploring subterranean tunnels, including crawling through a human skeleton and watching a lizard get devoured by a Black Widow), Chapter 3 (exploring an enormous tangle of brambles overrun with spiderwebs), Chapters 5 and 6 (which involve a gorgeous "Octopus Cactus" whose meandering thorn-covered tendrils seem to swallow an entire canyon), and Chapter 8 (crawling up a derelict culvert, complete with creaking chains, blasts of steam, and a misty, gloomy atmosphere) are the standouts.

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