BIPED 2: Not Quite Walking The Walk

It's 2008. I’m sitting on my best friend's bed and we’re playing Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga on his PS2. This is a pretty regular occurrence for us and kind of defines what video games were for me at the time - a thing I did with my friend. Over the years, couch co-op slowly faded, being replaced by online multiplayer, and playing games with my friend became “death, pass” – no less fun, but not the same. Times have changed again, though, and a new “golden age” of couch co-op games has arrived (A Way Out and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime to name but a few). 

Biped 2 is another. You and up to 3 friends play as bipedal robots trying to save the world - armed with nothing but 2 janky legs and a lot of perseverance you’ll be stepping, flying and falling, all while trying to not end those precious friendships. On paper, Biped 2 sounds like a sure thing, a great time designed for couch co-op. But in practice, it can’t quite nail that co-operative experience frequently enough.

In Biped 2 you control a cute enough, bipedal robot with each of its legs assigned to one of your controller's analogue sticks. The controls take some getting used to but once you do you’ll be able to stand on one leg to collect coins, grab levers to open doors and push both sticks in to glide across smooth surfaces. The controls are fine enough for the puzzles the game throws at you but what they can’t contend with is 3D space. The biggest difficulty my partner and I had while playing was not any puzzle, but instead telling where hazards were in relation to other objects. Pendulums, for example, that swing huge wrecking balls across your path were difficult to place until right up close, leading to many annoying deaths. We settled on the lighting being the issue - flatly lit objects lacking enough contrast to separate on screen, but we couldn’t know for sure. It's a shame, because the actual levels and biomes are quite nice to look at otherwise.

Those levels are filled with many more puzzles and platforming challenges than just those wrecking balls though. Some of these are fun - a later puzzle where your robots are connected by a rope was a highlight for us - but many of them are less so. There’s one challenge which repeats a number of times that involves catching small spheres in pens. We did this one a lot - enjoying it less and less with each iteration. A bigger problem though, is the fact that the challenges don’t always feel co-operative. The puzzles and challenges often feel like you’re playing them at the same time as your partners, rather than tackling them together. It’s not all the time - having the 2 bipeds voltron, with one of you controlling the legs and the other the arms is silly and fun - but often enough that it was noticeable. The challenges themselves aren’t all that bad, but I think fewer repeated challenges and more of the teamwork ones would’ve helped a lot overall.

While these problems are quite pervasive, the feeling the game is trying to impart (somewhere between laughter and anger, I think) isn’t completely absent. My partner and I would get frustrated at each other frequently when a puzzle took multiple tries, but the longer that went on, the more that would dissolve into manic laughter. It’s just a shame that many of those failures weren’t from the puzzles themselves, but the controls. The writing of the guide character, while simple, is often silly - it reminds me of how you’d talk to a cat, and having chosen the feline robot myself, was an extra layer on top! I just don’t think the game nails these feelings often enough. Straightforward, sometimes repeated, levels (on either difficulty setting available to us) made enjoying the bright spots tough, and the visibility of hazards in 3D space made controlling the robots a pain. If you’re after something to play with a group of friends, there’s probably enough here to keep you arguing amongst yourselves, but if you’re more interested in the puzzles and platforming, I don’t think Biped 2 really has the legs to keep you coming back.

A code was kindly provided for the purposes of this review.