Super Meat Boy’s humble flash beginnings showed promise of vision but held only a small fleeting candle to the delivered quality of the XBLA offering. A game that wears its heart on its blood soaked sleeve comes off like a love letter to those who were around and gaming in the era of 8-bit. An amazing amount of winks, nods and pokes to classic games have been weaved through every facet of the game including the music and small animated interludes between worlds. A reservoir of nostalgia bursting at the seams barely contained by the deft hands at Team Meat, it makes no qualms about punishing you mercilessly for your hubris and inviting you back for more with a toothy grin that only guarantees more challenges and even higher hurdles for you to smash against. Challenges that are overcome by pure mastery of the game itself rather than some arbitrary powers granted to ease your progress making your hard fought victories feel like losing battles won in the last few seconds. The quality on display here is in direct opposition to the fact that this is a freshman effort by a small team on XBLA and you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking they have been working here for years.
All gushing aside I must say that Super Meat Boy is at the top of the running for XBLA game of the year. It’s an absolute steal at the ten buck offering price for early purchases and still a phenomenal value at the fifteen dollar price point. If you have the stomach for an unapologetically hard game that was made to humble you in every way possible then buy this game now. Not that this game is unfair by any means. In my thousands of deaths I never once felt like the game was to blame. I knew every time that I miscalculated my actions and was summarily punished for my recklessness. But punished is a harsh word really considering most deaths set you back less than thirty seconds and gets you back off running almost instantaneously. And that is important considering how many times you will die. If they had been lazy and not optimized for quick restarts the game would have been severely damaged. Only in later levels are the deaths truly punishing when the length of these digital torture chambers are extended to raise the stakes and to tax your reflexes further.
Level designs in the later part of the game show a true passion for their creation. Sections requiring a complete knowledge of the character physics make you feel like a master in Meat Boy-ology. Meat Boy himself is both sticky and slippery but precise and really fast. The direction and velocity of how you slap against a wall will become tantamount to your survival and tricks like sliding up a wall to avoid dangers will become invaluable. If you have played any amount of N+ then you have a general idea of how things will play out but the physics in play here have a few more layers of depth and learning the odds and ends of the system is just as much part of the game as the levels themselves. And the fact that they built this all on two buttons, one to run and one to jump, is a shining testament to the skill in which the games systems were crafted. The physics are so solid that you will come to know the instant you make your jump whether or not you will succeeded.
What is truly amazing in the design of the levels is how they know the way you will try to run through it on the first try. Attempting to utilize a trick that may have been used in the past few levels is often times met with a saw blade to the face requiring you to rework your play style for a fresh new challenge thus keeping the over three hundred levels entertaining in the process. You will sometimes find yourself overwhelmed by a challenge set out before you only to have a revelation come to you after countless deaths that lets you traverse the level like a seasoned performer on the stage of his hundredth show. Although it’s quite possible you burnt through a hundred deaths to do so.
The music is as equally well composed as the game and is worth the admission price on its own. A collection of 8-bit techno mixes and dramatic orchestral scores, it is just as enjoyable as the game itself and has yet to wear thin for me. And that is a considerable feat with how much time you can spend in a single level while it plays. I don’t know if it was intentional or not but in some of the songs I found sound effects from old NES games like Punch-Out mixed in and whether it was intentional or not it’s certainly adds to the nostalgia factor permeating from the game. A very smart decision was made in letting the music continue as you die or progress through the levels in a single world instead of restarting or changing all the time. If the music restarted every time I died it would have been an inexcusable shame but as is they have used the music to craft an invitation to stay longer and get into that “Just one more try” frame of mind that will keep you up all night.
There are so many little things in Super Meat Boy that add gobs of charm to the experience. From the wet pattering sound of him running to the trails of blood left anywhere he touches. (The blood trails also serve as a great gameplay tool letting you see where your previous course had taken you.) The various art style switches that happen in some levels are also welcome additions to a great looking game. The inclusion of unlockable characters for you to play as from a collection of other indie developed games that all have their own unique play style was an ingenious inclusion and adds even more life to a game already bloated with content.
And there is a ton of content here. First you have the many standard Light World versions of all the levels with their Dark World counterparts unlocked by beating a levels par time that ramp up the challenge considerably. Add on top of that the secret worlds unlocked by beating the game and the various warp zones hidden throughout the levels and the even more hidden “Kill Screen” levels and the free level packs they intend to release through “The Internets” world and you will find yourself lost in a vast sea of content.
I can’t possibly say enough good things about Super Meat Boy. I could carry on for as many words as I’ve had deaths. But there is a few, incredibly small, nit picking issues I can take with the game. They are barely worth motioning. I ran into an odd glitch were if I was downloading marketplace content and it finished mid-level I would get kicked out to the main menu. Outside of that some of the boss battles felt pointless or superfluous. These small issues aside I have no other complaints and cannot recommend the game enough. The bar for 2D platforming has been set higher then ever by Team Meat and it will be interesting to see if anyone can top it any time soon.
Pros:
Amazing Character Physics
Stellar Music
Superb Design
Tons of Content
Cons:
Some superfluous boss battles
