Super Meat Boy is part of the Game Feast promotion from Microsoft and Xbox LIVE. Super Meat Boy is a tough-as-nails platformer where you play as an animated cube of meat who’s trying to save his girlfriend (who happens to be made of bandages) from an evil tux wearing fetus who lives in a jar.
Leap from walls, jump over seas of buzz saws, and run through crumbling caves and pools of old needles. Super Meat Boy relives the old school difficulty of classic retro platformers and streamlines it down to the essentials, no BS, just straight-forward twitch reflex platforming, and all while sacrificing his own well-being to save his damsel in distress.
So, I was lucky enough to get my hands on Super Meat Boy before and after playing the game for an extensive amount of time, I can tell you that the game is a wonderful fresh breath to the XBLA.
The game is a 2d platformer and true to it’s genre. When first picking up the game, unless you have been playing 2d platformers recently and often you may have a hard time out of the gate. After familiarizing your self with the controls and physics of jumping you should be able to go through the game at a steady pace. The difficulty can be trying at times and with some patience you should be able to eventually complete any moment in the game where you may become stuck.
You will die a lot. Luckily, there is no immediate penalty for dieing, with the exception of leader-boards and stats. This is an actual perk to the game as it will give you time to figure out how to approach the area where you may be dieing. Another great touch to the game is the shear speed at the game moves at. It moves fast, but not fast enough to cause problem from jumping from one wall to another.
A nice variety of levels give you a change in environment after each stage. There appears to be 7 main levels. The stages mostly have 15 to 20 levels per stage. You unlock as you go. Each stage has a boss and you don’t necessarily have to beat the whole stage to confront the boss of each stage. I found that if I where stuck on a particular stage that I would skip and when you hit a harder difficulty as the game naturally progresses you can always go back and complete what seemed to be hard before. I fond that I would die most trying to accomplish getting achievements in the game. Like finding Warp Zones or collecting bandages.
The graphics and sound are top notch and will not grow old very quick. I did find that trying to complete some of the ‘Dark World’ levels and couple of the ‘Light World’ levels there are certain stages that have a very plain and bland art style that while accomplishes changing up the level scenery, it also increases difficulty and frustration.
If you’re looming for something different to play on the XBLA Super Meat Boy is going to be the answer. It has hours of game play and the replay value on the game will be very high. The achievements on game are not easy to get without throwing some hours towards game play. It also has unlockable gamer pics. There are plenty of advantages and very few disadvantages to this game. When this game goes live on October 20 for 1200 points it’s definitely worth the buy, if you don’t want to miss out on the best 2D platformer to hit LIVE in recent years and will keep that title for years to come.
