The original Heave Ho was an excellent surprise for me and my family. We often play games together on Sunday nights, and I usually recruit them for any multiplayer game reviews I need to take care of in the week ahead. There are winners and losers in this kind of affair, and it doesn’t typically take all that long for each game to reveal which of the two it is. My son’s quite good with games and my wife is far more casual, so finding a game that pleases everyone is relatively uncommon. Outside of Overcooked, nothing we have played has generated as much joy for everyone involved as Heave Ho did. Hey, here’s a sequel!
The concept of Heave Ho was so straightforward that it’s hard to imagine adding anything to it without taking away from it. You’re a weird little creature with two arms and no legs. You have to use those arms to get to where you need to go, grabbing and climbing over anything and anyone to do so. Sometimes you’ll have to cooperate very closely with the other players, while other times everyone can just sort of go their own way. You control your character’s reach using the stick, with each arm’s grip assigned to the shoulder buttons. It seems so simple, but things ramp up nicely as the game asks you to overcome greater challenges.
On its face, there isn’t much a sequel can add here beyond more stages. Heave Ho 2 starts by doing just that. It also allows you to play online multiplayer in addition to local, useful for anyone who doesn’t have a crew at hand to play with. Now, whether or not you’ll be able to find anyone to play with online is an entirely different matter, but the feature is at least there. Both public and private matches are available, so if random people aren’t showing up, you can at least coordinate with people you know. Heave Ho 2 features full GameShare support locally and online, so other players don’t even need their own copies of the game. You need at least two players to make a go of things, though. That hasn’t changed. There is no solo in Heave Ho. But we do have a fart button now, and if that doesn’t justify a sequel all on its own, I don’t know what could.
Perhaps even more important than the fart button, which admittedly does have some practical use in the new competitive multiplayer mode, are the new gimmicks and elements you’ll find in the sequel’s stages. The first game mostly got by on its core mechanics and asking you to work together to get from Point A to Point B, a task that required increasingly daredevil antics. To its credit, that was more than enough to carry it through to the end of the game. That might have worked again here, but the developers have left nothing to chance by adding a lot of new twists. Each of the eight worlds has its own theme, and that theme can heavily swing what you’ll be doing in its stages. Some have a puzzle focus, some require working together to operate machines, and so on. You also get plenty of stages with the classic navigation challenges as the core theme, but with some sort of monkey wrench thrown in.
It adds more variety and challenge to the proceedings, but I must note that some of this proved to be a rather big ask for my wife. That was never a problem with the first game, but I suppose it’s an unfortunate side effect of ramping up the complexity of the gameplay. She still had fun anyway, but there were definitely some stages where she mostly hung out in a corner goofing off while my son and I completed the task at hand. It usually wasn’t too long before we hit a stage that she felt comfortable joining in on again, but it’s worth keeping in mind if you’re planning to play the game with others of mixed skill levels.
Still, in the long run, I think mixing things up like this was a good call. I’m not sure another full game of pure navigation stages would have been as interesting. While I don’t think it explicitly registered with the people I was playing with, the mileage the game gets out of those simple grab-and-fling mechanics this time around really was fascinating to me. Some of the world gimmicks work better than others, but I at least appreciated all of them. I wish I could say the same for the competitive mode, though. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it helps bring the magic of the cooperative play into sharper focus.
If you’re looking for a new game to add to your party night rotation, you really can’t go wrong with Heave Ho 2. While the new versus mode isn’t all that great, the new assortment of worlds and stages in the main cooperative mode will keep you and your friends or family busy for at least a few evenings. If you’re dedicated to finding all the secrets and completing all the extra challenges, you’ll get even more legs (arms) out of it. The addition of online play allows you to play even if you’re partying by yourself, but the real genius of the game comes from having everyone elbow to elbow in the same room. Heave Ho 2, like the first game, is great multiplayer fun for players of all kinds.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review Copy Provided by Devolver Digital
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