After 10 long years Super Meat Boy returned, this time as an auto-runner in a sequel that channels much of the original, except for what I loved most about it: quick controls and tight platforms. In the year of Spelunky 2 and Hades, it is a disappointment to see Meat Boy return without the key aspects that made him great.
Super Meat Boy Forever was originally announced in 2014 as a mobile game. Then, half of the independent Team Meat duo, Edmund McMillen, left to focus on other projects, leaving co-creator Tommy Refenes to restart the console project in 2017. Other developers were eventually recruited. , the new Team Meat announced a launch date in early 2019 and almost two years later it is finally here.
Last week, as a timed exclusive for Epic Games Store and Switch – the game will finally come on other platforms –Super Meat Boy Forever it forces your bloody smile to run forward at a constant clip as you hide, jump and let go through enemies and procedurally generated obstacles. Instead of the dead dungeons gathered in the first game, ForeverThe levels are more extensive business, with side scrolling, full of random dangers that get stuck every time you generate a new game world. None of these elements are bad alone, but they don’t really come together to create an arcade platformer that I feel like going back to.
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This is mainly due to the way the game is controlled. Being burdened with a constant impulse feels at odds with the free flow that returns in 2010 Super Meat Boy excelled at. You can change directions by jumping off walls or running on ramps, but for the most part Forever it’s about decoding the exact combination of jumps, bumps and sliding the wall to get through a certain buzz saw dam and then execute them to guide the Meat Boy to safety, as if he were remotely controlling a rocket fleshy. There is a disconnect between solving the puzzles and actually achieving the solution that just left me cold.
That doesn’t help Super Meat Boy Forever it feels especially floating, made worse by the occasional slowdown when many things happen. I had framerate issues when I was playing the Asus Zenbook, which seems to be isolated from some understanding around certain computer settings. I didn’t play the game on Switch, but there it is locked at 1080p at 60 fps and it seems to run very well based on GameXplainit’s time with the game.
Forever has a bright spot: her boss is fighting. Instead of always being propelled forward, the boss stages give you enough tools to navigate a small area and take down the weapons of the villainous Dr. Fetus maneuvering back and forth to reach the weak points. These meetings are cleverly designed and fun to realize, even when they accumulate dozens of deaths in the process. There were also times when the brilliance of the original game showed the most.
original Super Meat Boy was part of a new wave of indie tributes to genre classics. Two years before, Spelunky went out. In 2011, Supergiant Games was released Bastion. This year, all three have seen direct sequels or spiritual successors with Hades building on and far exceeding the laid foundation Bastion. In this context, Super Meat Boy Forever it feels particularly disappointing, offering not even more of the same from a prized classic, but instead a strangely compromised spin-off, whose car vanity feels stifling, without bringing anything exceptionally new or worthwhile. at the table. It’s not a terrible game and it’s still full of scenes that present a new chapter full of wind in it Meat Boy-verse. But it’s still stupid.