Review: Super Meat Boy

[Reckoner]

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Super Meat Boy is Team Meat's first venture into the world of Xbox Live Arcade and let's hope it certainly isn't the last. What originally began as a popular flash game, Super Meat Boy is a challenging 2D platformer that sets the bar quite high for the genre. Grab yourself a poncho as you sit down for this read; it's about to rain meat.

 

The game's single player follows the adventures of Meat Boy as he tries to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend from the hands of Dr. Fetus. Meat Boy must travel through several worlds of increasing difficulty if he ever hopes to see his sweet, lovely Bandage Girl again. While the story may seem awfully cliche and simplistic, it is filled with beautifully animated and hilariously scripted cutscenes. I hope you're a fan of old school video games because Super Meat Boy is riddled with references to them. From Ninja Gaiden to Street Fighter, the cutscenes will have you reminiscing the 8-bit days.

 

 

Gameplay in Super Meat Boy is very easy to learn. As you control Meat Boy, you must run, jump and wall jump your way to Bandage Girl. Holding down the right trigger or X will allow you to sprint for even longer and higher jumps, but it becomes harder to control where you will land. Carefully switching between running and sprinting jumps will be the key to success in this game. Dying will become commonplace in Super Meat Boy as you try to find the correct method of executing that leap as to avoid the spinning saws. Upon completion of any stage, the game's replay feature will kick in to simultaneously show each of your attempts to reach the end. I often found myself cheering for the wrong Meat Boy only to find out he fell into the lava pit just inches before the goal.

 

Super Meat Boy's level design will tease you at first with its simplicity, but that changes very quickly. Meat Boy must traverse through a dense forest, an old hospital, Hell itself and several more gloomy environments to accomplish his task. Each of these worlds are uniquely designed in style and difficulty; be prepared to nearly throw your controller out the window on some of the later stages. If you've played N+, you'll feel right at home with some of the obstacles Meat Boy has to deal with. You can expect to find missiles, lasers, saws and molten, hot lava carefully placed at precise locations to make you perfect your movements. If you die in this game, you have only yourself to blame.

 

Catchy metal riffs and electronic beats fill this game's soundtrack. The music always does its best to match the situation, but I found myself tuning out the music when the game became really intense. The music for the cutscenes and introductions felt a lot more memorable than the stage themes. On the other hand, the sound effects were always there to remind me of my failures. There's nothing like a good ol' splat sound after any neat death. When it comes to the sound effects in cutscenes, I especially loved the way the 2nd boss made those cute kissing noises at me. It's a shame he had to be put down.

 

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The game's main story will run you about 3-4 hours, but that's nowhere near the end of your journey. Super Meat Boy features a huge cast of unlockable characters from several of your favorite independent games. By hunting down band-aids hidden in some hard to reach places, you'll get to play as the heroes from Braid, Alien Hominid, Bit, Trip, I Wanna Be The Guy, and much more. The fun doesn't stop there, too. Head back and play in the game's Dark World for an added challenge and I do mean challenge; the Dark World is hard. If you eventually become one of the dedicated few to reach 100% completion, keep your eyes peeled for “Teh Internets” mode as you can download free levels developed by Team Meat and perhaps a few great user-created stages made by the game's PC audience.

 

Super Meat Boy is easily one of the best platformers around. The game's tough difficulty, laundry list of unlockable characters and free downloadable levels will keep you playing for weeks after you've completed the single player. This is definitely one of Xbox Live Arcade's must have titles. Do yourself a favor and check out Super Meat Boy for 1200 MSP ($15).

 

Score

10/10

[GothicDream]

Game's beast.