Oh, sequels, what a tribulation you are for both gamers and developers alike. Sometimes a follow-up captures everything you loved about the original game and then manages to expand, develop and refine it. Other times a sequel seems to, with unerring accuracy, cherry pick everything that irked you about its predecessor and, for some obscure reason, seeks to do more of that. Biped 2, I’m saddened to say, is the latter kind of sequel.
A cute isometric puzzle platformer, Biped 2 tasks you and now up to three co-op partners with navigating your endearingly charming robots around an array of levels. Controls remain as fiddly as ever, though they are oddly satisfying when it finally clicks. Each thumbstick operates a leg of your bipedal bot, so movement requires a whole lot of alternate waggling to get you where you want to go. Precision control is available by standing on one leg and then spinning like a top to plant your other leg on your desired target, until you’re ready to lift your original leg and go again. To travel greater distances you can push both thumbsticks in the desired direction to activate your hover skis and propel yourself forward with rocket-fuelled abandon, though this erratic movement option will be of little help in solving the numerous physics-based puzzles ahead of you.
Biped 2 makes one critical mistake; it assumes you played the original game within the last month or two. Now, maybe you have, in which case you’ll be better prepared for the difficulty spikes you’ll encounter here, but when it’s been five years since you last played Biped, this sequel just feels plain nasty. An unrelentingly gruelling challenge that seems to forget that the players might actually want to have fun together.
It’s important to point out that my co-op partner and I have a rock-solid track record when it comes to these types of collaborative game. We’ve seen off numerous Trines, Double Fine’s finest, and a whole heap of metroidvanias, brawlers, and platformers together. So, when I say that Biped 2 broke us, it really means something. For a game that looks just as cute and adorable as the original, this has ended up as one mean SOB.
From the get-go, the challenges here demand a level of precise control and collaboration that was simply beyond us. With no means of altering the difficulty, you’re stuck trying each obstacle again and again until you reach the point that you relationship might shatter if you play anymore. Take an early challenge as an example, in which your bipeds need to cross a chasm; sections of chunky platforms can be briefly extended by your partner stepping on – using the obscenely fiddly control scheme, remember – three different symbols. As they do this, you need to drunkenly saunter – using the obscenely fiddly control scheme, remember – from each extending and retracting platform to the other. If your partner stands on the wrong symbol, you fall off. If you get the timing even slightly wrong, you fall off. Then if that wasn’t enough, entirely random puffs of wind from the nearby cliff-face blow you from your perch.
After numerous attempts, once you’ve reached the other side – mostly through dumb luck, may I add – you’d think there’d be a shortcut to bring your partner over quickly. Perhaps a catapult or cannon that you could activate? Oh no, my friend, now you must do it all again, only with you pressing the symbols on your side of the chasm instead. This is level three. Suffice to say it turned me into a broken mess.
Thing is, if the control scheme or the physics were more nuanced, this level of challenge would be appropriate, but they’re not. Controls are so clunky and silly they belong in a lightweight party game, not a precision platformer. Meanwhile, the physics regularly misbehave. So, you and your partner might make it across the giant rolling log, alternating your steps so the platform beneath your feet doesn’t disappear, only for the physics to throw you off because, well, reasons.
In short, Biped 2 is in conflict with itself, it wants to be a co-op party game, but it also wants to offer an intense challenge. These two things, like chalk and cheese, don’t belong together, the end result being something entirely insufferable.
