Review: Mutant Mudds
Game: Mutant Mudds
System: 3DS (eShop)
Cost: $8.99
Release Date: January 26, 2012
Developer: Renegade Kid
I haven’t done a game review in a long time. There are a lot of reasons for that, but mostly it boils down to the fact that I normally don’t enjoy trying to sift through everything I feel about a game, stamp a number on it, and then tell you to buy something you may or may not like. Nothing really makes my opinion better than any of your guys’, and it’s taken a while for me to fully realize that. Still, I’m giving reviews another shot anyway, and hopefully I won’t look back on this one with as much regret as I do my Call of Duty: World at War and The Conduit reviews. Those games are not as good I claimed, but I’m pretty sure this next one is.
What game do I have the pleasure of reviewing today? The astonishingly charming platformer, Mutant Mudds.
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What would you do if earth was hit by a gigantic asteroid that brought to us thousands of muddy monsters bent on the destruction of the planet? Yea, I dunno either. I would probably laugh and run around like a maniac for a little while, and then make a point to find a way to destroy them. This, coincidentally, is almost exactly what happens in Mutant Mudds, only instead of running around like a maniac, the hero of this “12 bit” platformer leaves his grandmother’s house with a powerful water cannon and goes to save the world.
The premise of Mutant Mudds is not a complicated one, and the folks at Renegade Kid certainly won’t be winning any awards for “Best Story” anytime soon, but any die-hard platforming fan will tell you that we don’t play our platformers for the stories. We’re not really that interested in saving Princess Peach or collecting all of the bananas; we’re interested in the things we do along the path to victory. The levels we traverse, the enemies we defeat, and the power-ups we collect are the real fun of games like this. Mudds delivers in every single one of these respects.
Spanning five unique worlds, twenty fantastically designed levels, and around 6 hours of playtime for the main game (another 3-6 for the incredibly hard bonus levels), playing through Mudds seems about ten thousand times easier on paper than it does when you’re actually jumping along and shooting enemies yourself. If I could somehow see the tally of deaths I suffered on the last level alone, I would probably be terribly ashamed of myself. It’s wonderful.
I mean, let’s be honest: The real problem most of us have with platforming games these days is that they’re simply too easy. Mario hands out hundreds of lives like candy, LittleBig Planet could be beaten by a three year old, Uncharted’s mountains can be traversed while blindfolded, tied up, and being forced to play using only your feet, etc etc. Unless you want to explore the generally-poorly-designed indie PC game market, your options are terribly limited. This is why Mutant Mudds are so incredibly refreshing and fantastic. Because it’s hard. It’s going to keep even the most experienced platforming aficionados on their toes to the very end, and I haven’t even completed all of the twenty hidden levels, which are significantly harder than the main game. Even the game’s lead-designer Jools Watsham didn’t fully complete them all until today.
Technically he’s sort of biased in this statement.
So have no fear. If the assumption that you’d have an easy-going platforming adventure was keeping you from putting down to pick up this game, get your nine dollars ready. If you need more convincing, don’t worry, I’ve got that too.
When you play Mudds, there are a few things that stand out regarding the use of the 3DS hardware that push it to a technical level unreachable by older 2D games. Firstly, it runs silky smooth at what my eye believes to be 60FPS, which I can attest to being incredibly helpful in this genre. Next, you don’t just play on one “plane”, if you will. I’ll attach some screenshots to help you visualize this, but you actually jump back (further away from the screen) and forward (closer to the screen), which couples with the 3D effect for some really fantastic visual nuances.
Looks so cool in 3D.
By far my favorite visual nuance the game has is the movement of 2D sprites in a 3D space. Often times you’ll be walking along and ahead of you lies a hammer that’s facing the screen and will slam down on the ground in front of you at timed intervals. When you flip the 3D on, you can actually see the hammer sprite getting closer to the screen, slam down, and move away from the screen. It’s fantastically neat and something I absolutely urge you to try for yourself. Of all the 3DS games I’ve played, this ties with Super Mario 3D Land for coolest use of glasses-free 3D.
Aside from the wonderful gameplay and level design, Mudds has fantastic art direction. From the sprites to the backgrounds to the music, the atmosphere conveyed in the game couldn’t get very much closer to the perfect blend of Gameboy-esque music with SNES-like visuals. Or maybe NES-like visuals and SNES-like music. Or… maybe Genesis-like visuals would be more accurate…? Oh forget it. I’m just gonna go with the game’s self-description of “12 bit”. It really couldn’t be more accurate.
(A quick aside regarding the music: It’s really quite fantastic, and is better than most of what we saw from that era originally. If you’re a fan of chiptunes, don’t hesitate to hit up Troupe Gammage’s website.)
Now, when I play a game that’s this good with the intention of reviewing it, I’m always on the lookout for things that could be improved upon. The list of such things for Mutant Mudds is pretty darn short, and really there’s nothing at all bad about the game. I liken in to Star Fox 64 in that in that it’s more or less a perfect game in a certain respect. Nothing is poorly designed, every mark they aimed for was hit with almost pinpoint accuracy, and the only real downer is that the game ends. It’s a bit odd because this is a surprising juxtaposition against most games I’ve played by Renegade Kid, which fall more on the flawed-but-fun side of things, as opposed to the impressively-designed-and-fun side of things.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that Mutant Mudds is absolutely Renegade Kid’s best game, but there are one or two things that I think should have been added.
While playing, one almost wishes that there were bosses. I know that it’s a bit cliché, but putting bosses at the end of worlds, levels, or just at random intervals does a few things. Firstly, it gives a stronger sense of movement and accomplishment from world to world. Secondly, it helps us distinguish world 1 from world 2 and world 3, instead of feeling like all of the levels blended together in a mix of stellar platforming and fantastic atmosphere. Lastly, bosses allow for some absolutely awesome enemy design and creativity, which I know Renegade Kid (or perhaps Jools specifically) has an excess of.
The only other thing I can scour my brain for that should have perhaps been changed was the interface for navigating levels. It’s essentially a carbon-copy of Kirby’s hub world, but the way things are laid out doesn’t make it feel as though you’re really traveling long distances to new locations. Putting the different worlds on different screens, instead of grouping all the portals in once place, would have done more to make beating the game feel like even more of an adventure. Think Mario 3’s overworld instead of Kirby’s.
Still, in spite of these (incredibly minor) flaws, what Mudds boils down to is one of the most impressively designed 2D platformers we’ve seen in the last ten years, and a game that easily stands up to the best in the genre, including industry-standards like Mario. Heck, I’d honestly say it’s better than every 2D Mario I’ve played except perhaps Super Mario World and Mario Bros. 3. It’s hard, it’s fun, it’s cheap, and it’s something that any 2D platforming fan should purchase as soon as it releases on January 26th.
Get your nine dollars ready.
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Play this game if you enjoy…
8bit MegaMan (Series)
Kid Icarus (NES)
Super Mario Bros. (Series)
Better than…
Super Mario Bros., MegaMan 1, MegaMan 3, Kid Icarus, New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Worse than…
MegaMan 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Donkey Kong Country Returns
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