Le Cartel’s flailing physics comedy comes back seven years later with online play, eight ridiculous worlds, and one significant catch. You can’t go it alone this time.
You don’t win Heave Ho 2, you survive it
I spent my first hour with Heave Ho 2 as a disembodied head with two overeager arms, hurling one hand at a ledge, missing by an embarrassing margin, and sailing into a bottomless pit because the friend I was chained to let go at exactly the wrong moment. I was not upset. I was wheezing. That is the whole trick of this game, and the reason the original became one of Devolver Digital’s quiet Switch success stories back in 2019. Le Cartel Studio has spent the intervening years building a sequel that clearly understands what people loved about the first one, then made one bold decision that will define whether you love this one too.
What it actually asks of you
The premise hasn’t drifted far. You are a little floating head with two arms, and each arm clamps onto whatever is in reach when you press a trigger: a wall, a rope, a hanging handle, or the flailing limb of the person beside you. Crossing a level means throwing yourself hand over hand across the void, or linking arms with up to three other players to form a wobbling human chain that swings, stretches, and snaps at the least convenient second imaginable. It is a physics comedy first and a platformer a distant second. The laughs come precisely from how little control you have over your own noodly body.
What sounds like chaos plays with real precision, and that is the quiet miracle here. The controls are tight even when the results look deranged. Momentum builds the way you’d hope, chains stretch with a satisfying tension before they give, and every collision lands with a meaty little thud. You always look ridiculous. You rarely feel cheated. The gap between how graceful you intend to be and how graceless you turn out to be is where the entire game lives, and it never stopped being funny across the dozen or so hours I put in.
Eight worlds, and not all of them stick the landing
The campaign runs to around sixty co-op levels spread across eight themed worlds, and I appreciated how often the goalposts move. Flying High sends you scrambling up icy mountains via ski lifts and gondolas. Manor Mysteries hides keys you have to fish out before the exit opens. Spacebound Squad drops you into zero gravity and occasionally makes a whole team pilot a single spaceship, which goes about as smoothly as you’d expect. Booting the game up genuinely feels like a small surprise each time.
Not every gamble pays off. Chef’s Orders, which asks you to stack ingredients onto a plate, fought me and my group at every turn. Heave Ho 2 is tuned for flinging yourself around and hauling small objects, and the moment it hands you something large and unwieldy, the comedy curdles into frustration. Medieval Travels has a run of levels where you ferry a king on his throne without tipping him over, and we found it so fiddly that we caved and accepted help from the game’s cat drone, a mercy that swoops in after it senses you’ve suffered long enough. I respect that Le Cartel took swings on these oddball ideas. I just wish more of them connected.
Each level also carries two or three optional objectives: beat a time, find hidden hands to grab, wedge your party into a mystery silhouette. There’s an equippable camera for capturing sillier photo challenges too, and a long list of achievements that squeezes real replay value out of a modest amount of content. Clearing objectives earns you items and cosmetics, including a roster of crossover skins that runs from an Among Us crewmate to Henry from Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. The items are the smart part. The Ima Rock freezes you mid-air so a teammate can use you as a platform, and the arm spray extends an ally’s reach toward a far ledge. Almost all of them exist to help the people around you rather than yourself, which fits the spirit exactly. My only complaint is pacing: I earned the Mary Poppins umbrella so late that I’d already finished the stages where I most wanted it.
How it holds up on Switch 2
On Switch 2 the game runs clean, with none of the hitching that would sink a title built entirely on physics. That stability matters more here than raw fidelity, because the whole experience collapses if a chain lags or a collision registers a frame late, and it never did for me. The art is minimalist and bright, all bold colors and readable shapes, so a four-person tangle of limbs never becomes visual soup.
You can play with detached Joy-Cons using motion controls or stick to buttons on a Pro Controller, and both feel fine, though I gravitated to buttons for the extra precision. The standout Switch 2 touch is GameShare: one person who owns the game can host a session for up to three nearby consoles that don’t. For a game whose entire reason to exist is getting friends into the same room, that is a genuinely generous feature and the single best way to play.
Sound that knows the assignment
The soundtrack is light, jaunty, and content to stay in the background where it belongs, nudging the mood along without ever demanding attention. The sound design does the heavier lifting: the elastic creak of a stretched chain, the pop of a hand grabbing hold, the specific comic timing of a body smacking a wall. It’s the audio equivalent of a rubber chicken, and I mean that as the highest compliment a game like this can receive.
The multiplayer-only gamble
Here is the decision that hangs over everything. Heave Ho 2 is multiplayer only. The original could be played alone, one person patiently working both arms, and that door is now bolted shut. In exchange, the series finally gets proper online co-op, and it works beautifully when your group is stable, letting you fling friends into oblivion from another city entirely. That trade will thrill some players and quietly annoy others, and I can hear both arguments clearly. What I’ll say plainly is that this is a game engineered for company. With three friends on a couch it’s close to perfect. Alone, it simply isn’t for you, by design.
The competitive Showdown mode, meanwhile, is the one part I can take or leave. It rotates through a race, a last-one-standing survival scramble, and a dash to grab a handle first, best of five. It’s a diverting ten minutes and no more. The cooperative campaign is the reason to be here, and Showdown never threatens to change that.
Verdict
Heave Ho 2 is a joyful, cleverly built co-op comedy that improves the original in almost every way that counts, held back only by a couple of misjudged worlds and a forgettable versus mode. At ten dollars, with GameShare handing you the cheapest possible way to rope in three friends, it’s an easy recommendation for anyone with people to play alongside. Just understand what you’re buying: this is a party you’re not invited to attend by yourself.
