If only Meat Boy's simple joys weren't diminished in the transition. The studio deserves credit for trying something different. It was supremely, absurdly hard.) Super Meat Boy Forever remains as vibrantly revolting as you remember the original being, but the platforming design doesn't live up to the established pedigree. He tossed absurdly fast projectiles at me that brought to mind the most harrowing of Mario Maker levels. Fetus on a conveyor belt rolling towards certain death. The Meat Boy universe is at its best when it offers a demonic homage to the hellish 8-bit platformers of yore, and I stumbled into one of those famous, hidden "glitch zones" that transported me to a wonderful Mega Man send-up. I found myself wanting more of an author's touch.Ī lot of Team Meat's indelible charm is still present. The first game was challenging, but never unclear given a bit of observation. This works more often than it doesn't, but there were certainly incidents where I simply had no idea where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do. On top of that, Forever is procedurally generated, stringing together obstacles in a random seed. I ran into a boss that was particularly elusive of that attack, and as I learned, there is nothing more frustrating than sliding through a gigantic hitbox over and over again, adding a slight dash of defective wonkiness to a videogame that's already pretty difficult. Meat Boy is equipped with this forward lunge that's used to dispatch enemies and cross distances, and I found that part of the arsenal to be relentlessly inconsistent. Maybe that frustration would be alleviated if the controls still felt great, but I ran into a number of weird, slippery breakdowns throughout Forever. Elsewhere, I found tiles that, when passed through, turn solid, allowing me the chance to bounce backwards onto them as I was searching for higher ground. Levels are brutal, death is inevitable, and players will get that sweet feeling of accomplishment after beating a level. One world introduces a belligerent purple beam of light that, when defeated, briefly infuses Meat Boy with the ability to blast through certain barriers. The challenge of Super Meat Boy returns in Super Meat Boy Forever This time around Meat Boy is always running, like 's an auto-runner. Team Meat has also generated enough wrinkles to keep the auto-running blueprint from growing too staid. Those moments where everything clicks, and you finally pass through a helter-skelter trial unscathed, remain profoundly sublime. A lot of the glee found in the original-the white-knuckle chaos of a platformer that moves so fast that you're forced to rely on your primal instincts rather than your deductive acumen-is replicated in the sequel. Fortunately, Forever is far from a calamity. Reforging that functionality, scaling back the precision, seemed like an odd choice at best and a disastrous one at worst. One of the reasons people adore Super Meat Boy is for its airtight controls.
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