Heave Ho 2 Review - Multiplayer Madness!

Barely Magic Mike
2 minutes ago
6 min read

Folks, I'm afraid to be the bearer of bad news today. Gaming has peaked. This is it - there's nowhere to go but down. And you can thank Heave Ho 2 for this, because with its release we finally have a game that allows you to fart on your friends as a dedicated feature. Holding and releasing a single button will fling them off of you with a cloud of revolting butt fumes and often off the screen to their melodramatic death. But I can think of few better ways to end a friendship.

Those who have played Heave Ho’s original iteration know I'm not just being an immature gas goblin, as much as that accusation would be hard to defend against in court. But Heave Ho is truly an idiotic game for delightfully idiotic people, and to consider that an insult would be to misunderstand me as a person. Heave Ho is friendslop from before friendslop was even a thing. It mastered the concept of minimalist controls that orchestrate maximalist chaos, and to say I had hours and hours and hours of fun cackling at its absurdity with friends would be to put it lightly.

That said, for as much as the announcement of Heave Ho 2 made me bounce around like a kid who accidentally downed a couple of espresso shots, a voice in the back of my head reminded me that I want this, but given the simplicity of the original, how can it meaningfully be expanded upon to make a worthy sequel? This is probably what fans of the original are most curious to know, so let's talk about it.

For those not in the know, Heave Ho is thankfully a very simple game to explain. Playing on a standard controller, the left analog stick will control the direction of your arms, and the triggers will allow you to grab separately with each one. Grabbing a surface and rotating the analog stick will allow you to move your free arm, in turn rotating your strangely rotund torso to grab the next thing and do it all over again. Everything is driven by the game's physics, which feel consistent and predictable enough that dying always feels like your fault (or, often more likely, your friend's fault). It couldn't be much simpler and yet has a feel to it that will ensure every single new player will die over and over in the tutorial level as they try to figure out what the hell is going on. Once you get the hang of it, you and your friends can grab each other and link arms to swing each other over gaps (or into them, if you enjoy being mean to the people you love like I do). You'll also manipulate items, press buttons, solve puzzles and most definitely yell a lot. The yelling part is important - lots of yelling.

That about covers it, at least as far as the original game is concerned. It dropped you into a variety of bite-sized levels that could take one minute or twenty minutes depending on how much you and your friends suck, and yet the game feels great to control once you come to GRIPS with it, get it? Okay, I'll stop.

So, what's new in Heave Ho 2? More than I initially thought, actually. For one, the aforementioned fart button is more than just a funny noise for those of us who never mentally matured past our teens - if one of your friends keeps hanging onto you like a codependent tumor, a quick burst of ass gas will expel them away and force them to leave you alone. And while the original Heave Ho did have some options to make the level easier for your struggling friends, the sequel goes significantly further, allowing those who are at the exit to pilot a drone over to pick up the stragglers. The game will also recognize when your whole team is struggling for far too long and send help, which was welcome at some times, but felt mandatory enough that it was less welcome at other times when we were hoping to just figure things out ourselves, incompetently or otherwise.

Level design has also received an interesting upgrade. From the very beginning, you can access a huge number of areas all rated in difficulty, each of which contains a handful of levels to work your way through. There's a ton of content to complete in any order you wish, so it's great to be able to jump to another set of levels if one is becoming too frustrating. I really appreciate that many of the levels build on one another and are objective-focused, rather than strictly a task of navigating obstacles from point A to point B, though there is still a decent enough amount of that. But mixing up the objectives adds a lot of welcome variety to the level design, and the ability to choose from such a large number of worlds right off the bat is likely to make game nights more of a joy than ever before. While I've only discussed the cooperative campaigns so far, there is a Showdown mode that functions as a fast-paced competition where you'll race to a finish line or fight to the death. I personally found this mode to be fun and appropriately chaotic, but my husband, who's not much of a gamer and was constantly confused by this mode’s lack of clear direction and sometimes obtuse level design, was not a fan at all and was begging to go back to coop mode within a few minutes. So, your mileage may vary here, and the inability to customize just about anything at all within showdown mode is admittedly a shame. It's a fun diversion but may not have much staying power. And just to be clear, Heave Ho 2 is a strictly multiplayer game, with no way whatsoever to play it solo. Be aware of that if you’re jumping in and hate people.

Thankfully, arguably one of the biggest upgrades in Heave Ho 2 will be the fact that you can now play with your friends locally or online. And while I personally prefer games like this to be played with folks in the same room, having online capabilities is a very welcome feature that is sure to make Heave Ho 2 more accessible than ever - I just recommend sticking to playing with people you know, or else you might get into a lot of yelling matches with random strangers. Maybe that's your kink - you do you.

I wouldn't say Heave Ho 2 has gotten any sort of visual upgrade on a technical level, as it looks like exactly the same bright, deliberately fuzzy cartoon that made the original look so distinct. What has gotten a glow-up is the look of the levels, which now pack a ton of variety from snowy ski lifts to medieval castles to an art museum to outer space and beyond. The visuals were never the appeal here, but it looks great. Same with the sound design - the music is goofy as all hell, and the random hoo’s and ha’s of your little wacky arm people remain hilarious and blissfully stupid, as the universe intended.

My review boils down to this - if you're a fan of Heave Ho, great! This is Heave Ho but better. More content, better content, more ways to play with your friends, more ways to yell at your friends, and plenty of flexibility in what you play and what sort of assistance your friends can get. This is a sequel that takes an already fun party game and polishes it to a spit-shine. That said, if you weren't sold on Heave Ho’s silliness before, nothing presented here is going to suddenly entice you. It's weird, goofy, and janky, and all three of those things are part of the fun. It's not going to take the gaming scene by storm, but it sure as hell is going to be a game I play with my friends for many, many months to come. Heave Ho 2 earns itself the silver genie lamp of approval.