Ready to take on a ton of arcade-style stages on your own or with friends as you try to stick together and make it to the goal? Check out our Heave Ho review!

 

 

In Heave Ho on Nintendo Switch, your goal is relatively simple: don’t fall. Falling is bad. Fall, and you will go splat. You will, therefore, need to work on your own, or with up to three friends/acquaintances to complete each of the levels by reaching the flag that signals the finish line for a stage. The game can be played in Solo mode in which it’s you against the world, or in Cooperative mode, in which you’ll need to reach the checkered flag as a team. 

As you take on this bizarre experience, you’ll be able to customize your potato-with-arms-looking character by changing its skin color, hair, glasses, face, arms, voice, and costume – more on costumes in a bit. The game will then take you through a short tutorial to teach you the basics. You will use the left analog stick to move your character’s arms, using the L and R buttons to grab platforms with your left and right arms. You can go at it as is or use the assist mode, which places different colored and tagged gloves on your character so that you can always know which hand is which.

 

Stages start out devoid of color and very minimalist, but once you’re out of the first set of levels, you will start to see some variety. Colors will pop up, and you will get different backgrounds that will give you a better idea of where all the action is taking place. You will also start to run into hazards, such as the classic and always popular sharp and pointy spikes, as you explore mountains, caves, jungles, and more. Some of them will be small, single-screen levels to complete, while others will be more horizontal or vertical, with a bigger challenge.

As you play each stage, you should keep an eye out for any golden ropes for you to grab onto so that you can enter a dance mini-game. The golden ropes show up at random and are only available for a short period of time before they disappear. In the dance mini-game, you will need to match the way the lead character is moving its arms, and closing its fists so that you can be rewarded with some tokens. The more tokens you have, the more you can spend at the machine so that you can unlock some new costumes for the characters. As for the costumes, they will help to dress up your character to make it look very different from the stock form, including some cameos from many indie games that are also present on the Nintendo Switch.

 

Heave Ho includes an in-game trophy system that will reward you for completing a set of objectives. These include things such as surviving an air-balloon trip for 30 seconds, finishing a level in solo mode without dying, passing an object to another player, finishing a level in cooperative (co-op) mode without anyone dying, collecting all the tokens from all the levels, unlocking all available costumes, and more. It’s a nice assortment that will keep you busy for a while as you try to find the best way to reach the goal over and over again.

 

 
Heave Ho is a fun arcade-style game to enjoy at home or on the go, on your own or with friends, as you try to hold onto anything to save your life. There’s a ton of levels to play of different shapes and sizes, with a nice difficulty curve. Heave Ho is now out on Nintendo Switch for only $9.99, and it’s a lot of fun to play on your own or with friends.

 
Disclaimer
This Heave Ho review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provide by Devolver Digital.