Super Meat Boy 3D Review – Review
Super Meat Boy, but in 3D. It’s rare that a pitch can pretty much cover an entire review, but in every sense of the word that’s what you get here. Super Meat Boy 3D is a loving reinterpretation of one of the most notable indie games of all time. Prepare to feel ancient as I write that the original Super Meat Boy released sixteen years ago. For me, it was one of the first indie games I ever bought. I begged my parents for their credit card to buy the game on this strange website called ‘Steam’ so that I could play it on my small laptop that was only meant for school work. Now, almost an entire adulthood later, the meat is still alluring, but with this transition I do think some of the magic has been lost of what makes Super Meat Boy an all-time platformer.
The game doesn’t leave you hanging for long. The opening cinematic features an almost upsettingly detailed Meat Boy chasing after Dr. Fetus to rescue his girlfriend Bandage Girl. The world is incredibly colorful with plenty of details that blend into the background–little beavers running away from the robots Dr. Fetus deploys to cut down the forest, strange tall-legged creatures rummaging through toxic waste. It all helps to bring the world of Meat Boy to life in ways the original could only dream off. The core gameplay is still the same: as a cube of meat, you try to reach the end of the level. These levels are still punishingly difficult. From buzzsaws attached to every surface, exploding mines, lasers and pretty much anything that moves: all of these are out to kill Meat Boy.
If you know anything about the original, it is the tight control of Meat Boy. He’s both squishy in ways that a cube of meat would feel, but also able to perfectly cling to walls and slip around in his trail of meat juice. The good news is that this has almost perfectly been translated into 3D. Almost instantly I was transported back to 2010 and could feel that tight control, whether that is wall jumping to reach higher points, running across walls to avoid pits and simply the way in which you jump. That is all perfectly preserved and will be the main draw to keep you engaged. Meat Boy has also gotten a few new tricks up his sleeve. Most notable is the addition of a mid-jump dash that can give you quite a bit of speed and travel some distance. This is your tool to beat the devilishly difficult time goals and get ‘A+’ rankings. It is also a mechanic that fits the new design of the levels. You’re looking not just for ways to make it past obstacles, but discovering pathways and shortcuts that combine the wall run and dash to shave off precious seconds or find secret collectibles. I wish that the game could let me change the controls in the options. Using A to jump and X to dash really went against my platforming preferences. Especially with a reset button mapped to Y on the Switch controller.
However, this new mechanic is where Super Meat Boy 3D slips up. It is a combination of two very specific elements that ultimately made the experience more of a drag, most notably is the level design. While the original Meat Boy was pretty simplistic in its levels, here it feels like almost immediately new obstacle types are introduced. They might be as simple as robots cutting down parts of the level or branching paths, but they end up making the levels feel quite cluttered.There is a lot of open space to travel through but it ends up feeling like you’re on top of a miniature rollercoaster a lot of the time. The backgrounds and those aforementioned details in the stages become distracting and even dangerous as you work your way through longer and longer levels. The number of times I died on a pretty good attempt because some environmental acid was dripping from a background pipe I wasn’t interacting with became pretty frustrating. It feels unfair in a way that Super Meat Boy was always careful to avoid. Of course, this game is catering to an audience looking for an intense and difficult platformer. They certainly achieved that, but at times it feels like that recipe has been overdone.
My second main issue with the game is the stationary camera. Navigating a 3D platformer really depends on the camera and I feel that here Super Meat Boy 3D is adhering too closely to the original game. There are levels where this works perfectly, with the camera positioned at a distance, but straight behind Meat Boy. It helps the player to make decisions on the fly based on your jumps and dashes as you can see the level layout ahead of you. But then there are levels where the camera is slightly rotated to accommodate the level design and it breaks the flow and control of Meat Boy almost immediately. Instead of running straight ahead, you’ll now need to begin to run in a diagonal direction to not bump straight into a wall of spikes. It is difficult to grasp where Meat Boy will land. You will overshoot your jumps or jump from a wall into nothingness because you cannot reposition the camera. No joke, I wish this game would be playable on the 3DS in actual ‘3D’. It would be much easier to accurately judge the position of Meat Boy within his environment.
It is these elements that kept me from enjoying Super Meat Boy 3D as much as I’d like. Yes, it is still a fun platformer. But it is also the modern embodiment of why ‘just make it 3D’ is still as challenging today as it was back on the Nintendo 64. At times, Super Meat Boy 3D gets to do its own thing and focus on what made that original game a modern classic. Great controls with tight level design that encourage the player to replay it over and over again to get the best time and find the collectibles. Yet, too many times I felt like the meat was left cooking too long. It’s bent into very specific ways to adhere to that original game, instead of standing on its own two meaty legs.
