Yeah, so as some of you may have already gathered from my ranting and raging on steam, I have been playing Super Meat Boy and it is a cesspool of bad game design. I picked it up during the steam sale (3.5 €) as it got a lot of praise from many outlets, similarly to that other hard platformer VVVVVV. Now, that is where any comparison ends. I enjoyed VVVVVV immensly and it was a gem of brilliant minimalism and game design. It had some extremely hard challenges in there, but they were the variety that gave the rest of the game spice.
SMB however...where to start.
-The controls, even with the recommended gamepad, are shaky to say the least. I'd often just run off cliffs cause the game sometimes just wouldn't react to the jump button as I was holding down sprint, for example, and while you are required to do quite some acrobatics in mid-air, it's never really clear how momentum and mid-air movement works exactly.
- Some enemies you meet are ridiculous. One is a sort of flying maw that follows you and if it crashes into something it shoots smaller "projectiles" into every direction really fast. Almost impossible to dodge if it crashes into a wall next to you (which it usually does). Bad game design.
- Difficulty is all over the place. Even in mid-game there are some aburdly easy levels in between the (majority of) insanely hard levels. The 3rd "chapter" of 6 is actually 10 times easier than the first two, for example.
- My biggest gripe of all: consolitis, in the form of a lack of checkpoints. Every level you play must be done from start to finish without dying. If you die anywhere, you start all the way at the beginning of the level. And the levels are often HARD. Not to mention long. It's the same disease as in all console games, like GTA: to get to a mission you must drive 5 minutes to get there. Once you are there and die during the mission, you must DRIVE UP THERE AGAIN. Over and over. That's a pointless extending of gameplay that serves nothing but to frustrate.
In SMB this results in you replaying the first 30 seconds of a long level dozens of times (if not hundreds) to get to the equally hard last part that you couldn't see (it sidescrolls) before getting there. So, you get a vicious circle: you die a lot at the end cause you can't really get a hang of it cause you need to get through 70% of the level first, but then you start dying a lot in the first 70% of the level because you are so bored with it and just want to get it over with, so you get careless. So annoying, and horrible design. I thought the 80's were over. I don't mind a challenge, but this is just extending the game's life with bad tricks.
One lousy fucking checkpoint in the middle of a long level would have been enough and SO easy to implement...but nope. Of the 15 hours I've played SMB, I'm sure at least (and probably more) 9 were spent on replaying the same old parts over and over again. VVVVVV took only 6 hours, with only a fraction of SMB's repetition. It basically cut out all the fluff. - After wrestling my way through the pretty insane last level and the final boss fight, I get to a "surprise" final level where you need to escape with Bandage Girl (the one you try to rescue all game). Basically, I beat the boss, got a cutscene, he puts autodestruct into motion and you need to escape. So far so good. I try the level a few times, get reasonably far in it (it wasn't as hard as the previous two, was confident it wouldn't take me long to finish it) but then decide to take a break for a while as I had been playing for an hour or so already. Now...while you always spawned at the beginning of the level while dying in the level itself...it turns out that if you return to the map THERE IS NO WAY OF RETURNING TO THE SECOND PART OF THE FINAL LEVEL WITHOUT BEATING THE BOSS FIRST TO GET TO THE CUTSCENE RAAAAGHHH. DIDN'T GET A WARNING, NOTHING. Now I just have the option to select the final boss battle, nothing else. I just checked again to make sure.
So yeah...I went "fuck that". That's just stupid. They can keep their fucking shit game. I wanted to finish it to silence all the hype n44bs going "u just mad coz u cant finish it lol" I would inevitably get on my case for criticizing it, but jesus. I watched the final cutscene on youtube.
If it wasn't a virtual copy, I'd have burned it or given it to a homeless guy to use as a beer coaster. So don't buy it, it's terrible.
A half
out of 5 for the artwork. The rest of the game is worthless and a waste of time
JK. I personally can't see how on EARTH anyone would like SMB, but I guess there's little point in discussing taste. (because we all know my taste is SUPERIOR...well not really)