Super meat boy is a frantic style retro platformer, in which you slap your meaty body around 300 unique levels filled with spinning blades, lava and destructive machinery. All of this is done to save his lover Bandage girl, who was kidnapped by the evil doctor Fetus. Super meat boy is comparable to classic games as Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Brothers. Rather than pixels, the game uses a simple line of block style which works fine for the game, as it makes things very clear. When you’re flying around the screen, it does a great help spotting hazards within the half of a second.
The game is level based to 20 per chapter and 5 chapters making the main story of the game. The idea is to traverse the levels to meet the Meat’s boy lover – Bandage girl kidnapped by the evil doctor Fetus. If you’ve played a Mario game, then you can already guess the formula of this one. As he is essentially a chunk of raw meat, Meat boy is very vulnerable to the external threats around him, meaning that a buzz saw will do nasty things to the main character. The levels are quite short, but difficult and completing them will require you to memorize each section, which means you’ll have to execute the right maneuvers to reach the end, where patience and determination come in.
Meat boy’s main ally is his agility. Mastering the basic functions on the controller is essential to progress in the game. It’s a good thing that Meat boy is very maneuverable in the air, but this doesn’t mean that it’s going to get easier to overpass some of the hazards. Each chapter is set in a unique location, the variation between levels is done well enough , so they don’t repeat themselves over and over again. The game tests your skills in different ways and every hazard or enemy introduced in the game will fire their best challenges. But what really makes the game work is the genius of the level designers and how different mechanics are combined and this inevitably makes you come back to the game.
As this is a platformer, the amount of control you have over your character is one of the most important factors for the developers to get right. Although it seems a little shaky at first, when you get used to Meat boy’s movement, you’ll find that it is the most precise and responsive platformer ever made. The mechanics of the game are up to modern standards and makes the game more and more enjoyable. Like those other titles, the game is fairly difficult and will force you to play levels over and over again, until you master them, but level are quite short and the respawning is very quick, sometimes too quick. As all the decent platformers, there are bosses at the end of each chapter, varying in difficulty from fairly easy to very hard, but each one is very fun and adds another character to the game. All together, there are 15 unlockable characters in the game, each of them having a special ability to vary up the gameplay Outside the story mode, there are further levels to unlock, as well as a chapter unveiled at the end of the game called The Internets, which enables the developers to release map packs for free.
This game is recommended to everyone, especially to those players fans of retro platformers , but also to the new players of the genre, this could well be the new Mario of this generation, it’s precise, a lot of fun and one of the best arcades released this year
