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Heave Ho: Hands-On Preview
Fancy a casual fling with friends minus the morning after awkwardness? Heave Ho could be for you. This co-operative physics-based platformer requires you to work with up to three other players to climb, swing, and toss your way towards each level goal. But while many hands may make light work in Heave Ho, it’s getting the brains behind them to think in sync that brings about both the challenge and the hilarity.
Heave Ho delivers a similar brand of same-screen physics-based fun as 2017’s Snipperclips, but whereas that game was about chopping pieces off your partners in order to solve puzzles, Heave Ho is about bonding your bodies together in a human chain to contort your way towards a common goal without collapsing in a heap. In a way, Heave Ho is a bit like Snipperclips with slippery grips.
Heave Ho is a bit like Snipperclips with slippery grips.
“The control setup is appropriately simple; you use the thumbstick to stretch the double-jointed arms of your avatar out in any direction, and squeeze the left and right triggers to grab a hold of the environment, or a fellow player, in each hand. That’s it. But in practice things aren’t so easy, as the left hand often doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, especially when there are three additional right hands wrestling for control amongst the one flailing mass of body parts.Coordinating what is effectively the spilled contents of a barrel of monkeys is as chaotic as it sounds, particular across environments that require you to constantly reorient yourself over and under objects where one ill-timed adjusting of grip can cause some or all of you to plummet to your doom. Crucially there are no penalties for death and restarts are instant, meaning you’re free to experiment in order to find the ideal method for traversal, be it linking arms and using your combined momentum to tarzan your way across a gap, or just hurling your buddy towards the goal often completely against their will. The more audacious the attempt, the more hilariously silly Heave Ho gets.Level designs start simple but soon introduce spiked surfaces to navigate and seemingly impossible chasms to cross. There are also optional coins to collect, but they’re not magically hoovered up into an invisible purse like a typical platformer, instead Heave Ho’s coins are actual physical objects that must be picked up and passed between players, upping the degree of difficulty as you try and cradle the coin towards the goal whilst remaining anchored to the environment at all times.
Golden ropes are introduced to levels at random, usually placed in a hard to reach corner of the screen, and if you can maneuvre your mob to grab hold of one you're briefly teleported into an obstacle or rhythm-based mini-game offering an additional opportunity to win coins that can be then spent on customising your character.
In Heave Ho, failing as a group is considerably more fun than succeeding on your own.
“Heave Ho also features a mode for solo players, but my experience with it in this preview build makes it seem like the least optimal way to play the game. Monkey-swinging your way towards an objective is significantly more straightforward when you’re on your own, and robs Heave Ho of the unpredictable and uncoordinated silliness that comes with having multiple players scrambling and sailing towards a shared goal like a loose clothes line caught in the wind. It certainly seems that in the case of Heave Ho, failing as a group is considerably more fun than succeeding on your own.
If you and your like minded friends share an itch for same-screen couch co-op, then Heave Ho will likely scratch it with both hands when it launches on PC and Nintendo Switch on August 29.
Tristan Ogilvie is a video producer at IGN's Sydney office. On the rare occasion he tweets, he can be found here.