Heave Ho 2 Is a Machine for Manufacturing Arguments With Your Friends, and That's the Point

The core loop is the same beautiful, frustrating thing it always was. Each level is a physics playground of ledges, gaps, and moving parts, and your only tools are your two hands. Reaching the exit is rarely a matter of skill in isolation and almost always a matter of coordination: someone anchors to a wall, someone else swings out from them, a third player climbs the resulting human rope, and the whole precarious structure holds together only as long as nobody panics and lets go. When it works it feels like a magic trick you performed together. When it fails, and it fails constantly, it is because a single link in the chain made a single bad call, and the resulting pile-up is where all the joy lives.

Heave Ho 2 stretches this across eight themed worlds, and the variety is where the sequel earns its number. You are hauling each other through weightless space, slipping around a chaos kitchen, navigating medieval contraptions, and dodging a growing catalogue of interactive hazards: drones to grab onto, ski lifts to ride, lasers to avoid, keys to carry, sauce bottles that do exactly what you fear they will. The designers clearly understand that the fun comes from levels built to be just barely possible, and the best stages are the ones that force the group into a specific, awkward, one-shot maneuver that only clicks after several catastrophic failures.

Crucially, the levels are still tuned around two players, with additional bodies generally making things easier rather than harder. This is worth knowing going in. Heave Ho 2 scales from two to four, but it is fundamentally a game about tight cooperation between a small number of people, not a raucous eight-way free-for-all. A duo who communicate well will get more out of it than a chaotic four-stack, which is either a feature or a limitation depending on the night you are having.

The online implementation, the sequel's headline addition, is handled with real care. Players can drop out and rejoin a session mid-run without forcing everyone back to a menu, which matters enormously in a game this prone to connection hiccups and this dependent on keeping a group together across an evening. Local couch co-op returns untouched for the purists, and the two options coexist cleanly.

Alongside the cooperative campaign there is Showdown, a competitive mode that repurposes the same grabbing and swinging into direct player-versus-player scrapping. It is a fun diversion and a smart use of the toolkit, though it is clearly the side dish rather than the main course; the heart of Heave Ho has always been working together, and the game knows it.

The honest caveat sits underneath all of this, and it is the same caveat the original carried. Alone, Heave Ho 2 is close to pointless. There is no meaningful solo mode, the systems are shallow by design, and the content, while charming, is not especially deep or long-lived once the novelty of each hazard wears off. This is a game that is either a nine or a four depending entirely on whether you have people to play it with, and no amount of new worlds changes that fundamental dependency.

Heave Ho 2 wears the unmistakable Devolver house style: clean, bold, and cheerfully absurd. The bodies are simple ovals with expressive cartoon faces, the worlds are built from flat, high-contrast shapes in punchy color palettes, and the whole thing reads instantly even in the middle of a four-person tangle. That clarity is not just an aesthetic choice, it is a functional one, because a game this chaotic lives or dies on whether you can tell at a glance which flailing limb is yours.

The animation is where the personality really comes through. Those little bodies swing, stretch, and flop with a floppy, weighty physicality that makes every successful grab feel earned and every failure look hilarious, and the faces sell the drama, all wide-eyed panic on the way down and smug little grins on the way up. It is a game that understands its own comedy is physical, and it animates accordingly.

The audio pushes the same buttons. The soundtrack is a bouncy, upbeat electronic backing that keeps the mood light no matter how badly a run is going, and the sound effects, all satisfying grabs, boings, and thuds, punctuate the slapstick perfectly. None of it is going to win awards for depth, and none of it is trying to; it is a tight, funny, purpose-built comedy machine, and every part of the presentation is bent toward making the failures land as laughs.