After 10 long years Super Meat Boy is back, this time as an automatic runner in a sequel that channels a lot of the original, except for what I loved most about it: clever control panel and stiff platform. In the year of Spelunky 2 and Hades, it’s a disappointment to see Meat Boy come back without the key aspects that made it great.
Super Meat Boy Forever wash originally announced in 2014 as a mobile game. Then half of the indie duo Team Meat, Edmund McMillen, went over to focus on other projects and allowed co-creator Tommy Refenes to reload the project himself in 2017 for consoles. Finally, other developers were recruited, the new Team Meat announced the release date of early 2019, and almost two years later it is finally here.
Last week was an exclusive time for Epic Games Store and Switch – the game will eventually hit other platforms –Super Meat Boy Forever force your smiling bloodthirsty to run forward with a constant cut as you duck, jump and hit your way through procedure generated enemies and obstacles. Instead of the close-knit death row inmates in the first game, Forever‘s levels are more expansive, side-scrolling affairs full of random dangers that include every time you generate a new game world. None of these elements are bad in themselves, but they do not really come together to make an arcade platformer that I feel like returning to.
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This is mostly because of how the game controls. The fact that a constant momentum is taxed feels contrary to the free-reflective flow of 2010 Super Meat Boy excelled at. You can change directions by jumping off walls or running up slopes, but mostly Forever is about decoding the exact combination of jumps, beats, and wall moves to get through a given avalanche of buzzes and then execute it to guide Meat Boy to safety, as if controlling a fleshy rocket remotely. There’s a disconnect between solving puzzles and running the solution that just left me cold.
It does not help Super Meat Boy Forever feeling particularly swaying, getting worse due to occasional slower things than many things going on. I had problems with the framework on my Asus Zenbook, which is apparently isolated some willingness around certain computer settings. I have not played the game on Switch yet, but there it is closed at 60 fps at 1080p and it seems to work well based on GameXplain‘s time with the game.
Forever it is a lying point: his boss fights. Instead of always moving forward, boss stages give you enough tools to navigate through a limited area and the villain Dr. Take down fetus’ objects by moving back and forth to hit weak spots. These encounters are cleverly designed and fun to figure out, even if there are dozens of deaths in the process. It was also the moments that showcased the original game’s brilliance the most.
The original Super Meat Boy was part of a new wave of indie tributes to genre classics. Two years before that, Spelunky came out. Supergiant Games is released in 2011 Bastion. This year saw all three direct successors or spiritual successors, with Hades builds and yet far surpasses the foundation laid Bastion. In the context, Super Meat Boy Forever feels particularly disappointing and no longer even offers the same from a valuable classic, but a strange compromise with the automatic runner’s arrogance without bringing anything extraordinarily new or worthwhile to the table. It’s hardly a terrible game, and it’s still full of tracks that have a windy new chapter in it. Meat Boy-verse. But it’s still a bummer.