Mutant Mudds initially came out on the 3DS and met with generally warm reviews. It probably didn’t set anyone’s loins ablaze, but it was certainly functional and fun, using a bit of a gimmick to get mileage out of the 3D effect. Now developer Renegade Kid is expanding the game to different platforms, gracing the PC with Mutant Mudds Deluxe. So how does it fare?
The story is simple: You’re playing some good ol’ video games with your grandmother when all of a sudden, a meteorite crashes outside your house. And then… MUTANT MUDDS.
It probably took longer for you to read that sentence than the actual cutscene takes to wrap up and hand control over to you, but it’s alright; the plot is just as charming as it is simplistic and retro. It’s not wordy and it lets you know what you need to know: You’ve got to get yourself a water gun and blast mutant mudds away.
The game sees you traveling across a few worlds each with a handful of levels, in which you collect these shiny squarish coins. Collecting them adds them to your cash amount, which in turn can be used to buy upgrades for your water gun. The interesting bit here is that any coin you pick up is gone forever; if you go back to that level, you’ll see that the only coins remaining are ones you’ve missed. Because the levels don’t hard reset, it almost encourages you all the more to want to go through them over and over again, if only to get the last couple coins you missed.
The primary draw of the game is the fact that all stages exist in 3 separate slices, the background, middle, and foreground. There’s nothing intrinsically special about each slice of a level except that it means most levels are about 3 times the size of their physical length because of it. Jumping back and forth between slices requires the aid of a special arrow pad, and whichever 2 you’re not on get a depth blur effect.
A lot of the interesting ideas come when enemies “break the rules” by leaping from the background to the middle in order to attack you, and the first time it happens it’ll catch you a bit off guard. Sadly not enough enemies seem to exploit this feature of the game and since it also doesn’t really factor into any sort of puzzle solving, it seems almost entirely aesthetic. Sure, you can definitely argue that it’s a good aesthetic, and it is, but it feels like you could theoretically remove it from the game and the actual gameplay wouldn’t change much.
Fighting enemies is a fairly simple affair. Most are blubbering piles of mud that lurch around on the ground, but some have wings and will require a little bit of fancy hovering with your water jetpack to take down quickly. Their movements are fairly predictable, but it’s actually often better to avoid a fight rather than try to clear the level; they offer no reward for killing them, and you only have 3 hearts before you die. They don’t regenerate and there’s no way to replenish them (that I’ve seen).
When you do finally die, and you certainly will, you will be started back at your last checkpoint. If you hadn’t gotten one yet, it’s back to the beginning with you.
The difficulty is definitely jarring at first. Hazards we haven’t seen for a long time like spikes of insta-death, platforms that blink on and off in mind boggling patterns, and ice that is brutally slippery make appearances, and navigating every level is as much platforming as it is blasting mudds. In fact, one might say that one of the goals is to simply get through each level as quickly as possible, since you’re being timed. That said, being careful is equally important.
As far as bonus content goes, there is quite a bit. Beating a level unlocks a corresponding “ghost level” where the rules are bent and the challenge is heightened. Enemies are impervious to your water gun and the levels are coated in some spooky thick mist. There are unlockable characters as well as levels geared more towards punishing veteran players, but given the stiff challenge I’ve met already, I’ll save those for a rainy day.
Too spooky for me.
Although the 3D gimmick isn’t really intact here, Mutant Mudds Deluxe is a great buy if you had cold feet about the 3DS version. The extras are cool and the port is a treat to play; it runs smooth as butter and the default key bindings are very intelligently set up. The developer knew exactly how a keyboard and mouse player would feel most comfortable, so the learning curve was a matter of seconds. You should get it, kill mudds, and be merry.
