Hello once again my Time Waster pals!
This week we’re taking a look at a simple little platformer that revolves around an invasion of small brown (not green) aliens who have come to earth by riding a large meteor and crashing it into our planet. These muddy blobs come in several different shapes and sizes, and it’s up to you to send them packing back to wherever it is they came from.
In this game you play as the character Max, who reminded me a lot of Jeff from the Earthbound series when I first saw him. As Max you grab your gun and jetpack and take it upon yourself, for no particular reason, to get rid of the muddy menaces. As you may have guessed, there isn’t much of a story in this game. Fortunately, being that this game is a straightforward and casual title, it doesn’t really need one. It supplies you with one objective, and that’s good enough.
But the story isn’t the only thing that can be called simple in this game, because the controls are also about as basic as they come. Move, jump, jump again to hover, and shoot; that’s all there is to it. Luckily though it’s as I said before: this game is straightforward and casual, so it doesn’t need anything extravagant to make it good as well as entertaining.
However, there is one thing that caught me off guard when I sunk too deeply into believing that this was going to be like any other 8-bit platformer. This happened when I ran across an orange jump pad and, when jumping on it, found my character leaping into the background to another part of the level. Once making it back to the normal level depth again, I thought the same thing was to happen when I found another jump pad, but to my surprise it didn’t. Instead Max leapt closer this time, landing on a bit of level that I hadn’t even noticed being so close to the screen. I know it’s nothing really new, but it still wasn’t what I was expecting from a game like this.
This playing with the different level depths is present throughout the entire game. Not only does our character leap back and forth between the different sections, but enemies are also prone to jump back and forth between different level depths. Apparently this style of play was meant to take advantage of the Nintendo 3DS’s 3D capabilities, but as I played this on the PC, I can’t really tell you how well this wound up working out when everything was said and done. It’s just something you’ll have to find out for yourself if you own a 3DS and download this game on it.
So in summary: Mutant Mudds’ mechanics are simple so that anyone can give it a go, the jumping between level depths gave the game a splash of something a little different, its 8-bit music and graphics are pleasing to listen to and look at, and it keeps you pretty well entertained. The only thing I could ask for is something to make Mutant Mudds a bit more compelling to play, but I’m not going to condemn the game for the lack of it.
That said, Mutant Mudds gets 4 out of 5 GiN Gems!