Back when indie games didn’t release every five minutes, I was always looking to get my latest platforming fix. Games like N+ and Braid made me feel warm and fuzzy, but in 2010 a new meaty offering blew them all away. Super Meat Boy was and is one of the greatest 2D platformers ever made, and for a long time I didn’t want to play anything else. Many years went by and we saw nothing more of the red protagonist and the blades that pulverised him. Eventually a couple of spin-offs appeared, but they didn’t really light the world on fire. Now though Meat Boy is so back, and Super Meat Boy 3D is ready to kill you over and over again.
There were many things that made Super Meat Boy special, but one of the most important was how instantly you’d respawn to start a stage again. With such tricky platforming challenges laid out in front of you, it would be so easy to get disheartened on death. Instead those instant restarts mean you just go again, and I find it impossible to stop until I succeed. Super Meat Boy 3D does this just as well as its predecessor, as well as so many other things.
So as you might imagine in Super Meat Boy 3D you’re jumping through devilishly difficult stages, aiming to rescue Bandage Girl from Dr Fetus (who I’m not sure is a real doctor). This would be impossible without perfect controls, because you’d just immediately get too frustrated by the sheer number of things that killed you. Sluggerfly uses its platforming expertise to ensure those precise controls continued into the third dimension, and in doing so created a worthy successor.
The fleshy protagonist of Super Meat Boy 3D has had a simple but very effective moveset. This consists of a jump, an air dash, and wall jumping and wall running – and together these allow you to navigate even the deadliest of settings. You’ll probably remember most of these moves from the 2010 classic, but the new air dash is a welcome addition which allows for spectacular motion around blades, rockets and flames. I can’t understate how good the movement feels in this game.
The first few stages of the game help you settle into this hardcore platforming experience, but before long you’ll be facing some serious challenges. Timing jumps to dodge flying blades as glass crumples below you, then bouncing off walls between spikes is simply all in a day’s work for Meat Boy. Across the different themed worlds you’ll face all sorts of nightmarish hazards, and will have to learn the best way around them if you want to make it to the goal.
It’s not all just about completing each stage though, if you really want to do everything in Super Meat Boy 3D you’ll need to find bandages and beat levels under time limits. The bandages are used to unlock bonus characters, who sometimes even control differently to Meat Boy and completely change the game. There’s one bandage in each stage, but you’d better believe collecting them isn’t easy. Each level also has a time to beat for an A+ ranking, and doing this unlocks an uber hard dark world version of it to complete. The amount of content in this game is vast if you’re willing to take on all the different challenges, and I know I’ll be trying to 100% it for the rest of the year.
Super Meat Boy 3D is practically everything I was hoping for, but it does have a couple of tiny issues. One of these is that the difficulty takes a while to quite hit the level I was hoping for, and even by the time I beat the final boss there were only a few stages that took more than thirty attempts to complete. I also didn’t really have a great time taking on some specific stages with low gravity orbs, but one slightly iffy hazard in a whole game isn’t bad going.
I was a little cautious with what to expect from a 3D take on this beloved 2D platformer, but Sluggerfly knocked it out of the park. With precise controls, challenging stages and all a whole lot of blood, Super Meat Boy 3D truly captures what made the original game great. As long as you’ve got the patience and skill to take on this hellacious platformer, you’ll have a blast dying over and over again.
