Super Meat Boy 3D is one of those games that it’s hard to believe exists. The original Meat Boy was one of those quintessential “Newgrounds games” that was both an exceptional display of talent, while being the right amount of early-2000s edgy. To see it grow past its humble beginnings into something that got its own announcement at the Xbox Partner Showcase is truly inspiring.
Super Meat Boy 3D is an interesting experience since, while it exceeds its predecessors’ retro design, it also feels a bit held back by those same advancements. While it still retains the same kind of fun and challenge as its predecessors, it also feels strangely inferior to those games.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Super Meat Boy series, there’s not really much to tell. A little cube of sentient meat sets out to rescue his girlfriend, a sentient ball of Band-Aids, from the evil Dr. Fetus, who is a fetus in a jar piloting a mechanical suit. It’s a fairly empty plot that mostly traded mostly on that early 2000s-era Newgrounds “well, isn’t this shocking,” that surely popped a few monicles back in the day. Super Meat Boy 3D is no more creative with its plot.
“Super Meat Boy 3D is one of those games that it’s hard to believe exists.”
What really made Super Meat Boy stand out was its gameplay, which was a tough-as-nails platformer that required pixel-perfect precision and an endless amount of patience. You could argue it was the first—or at least most competent—version of the “frustration platformer,” (you know, those platformers where the whole gimmick is being completely unfun to play?) The only difference was that Super Meat Boy was genuinely fun to play because its controls were intuitive and responsive, and its levels were just the right amount of challenging.
Super Meat Boy 3D, however, doesn’t fully achieve this same effect primarily because of its jump to the third dimension. Meat Boy feels more slippery than normal, and controlling him is a bit unwieldy. He’s got a weird sense of gravity that makes him a bit too floaty, which worked in 2D, but not so much here. On top of this, laying levels out in 3D creates weird perspective shifts in the camera that can make it hard to know where to place your jumps or where to even progress.
This can result in a lot of misplaced jumps that either send Meat Boy careening into the distance or into OOB areas that seemed like standard walls. Ironically, the game is kind of at its best when it’s just replicating 2D environments, giving players a good sense of where to go and what to avoid. Other times, the camera is so pulled back that you don’t get a good sense of where Meat Boy even is relative to platforms, so you end up missing them by a country mile.
Furthermore, the ways the game tries to mitigate the jump to 3D don’t really help as much as they should. In order to flesh out the three-dimensional gameplay, Meat Boy is given a Wall Run and a Dash, and in fairly normal environments, these function as you’d expect. But Meat Boy still maintains his Mega Man X-style Wall Jump—where he can both jump off walls and ascend them by jumping.
When the game uses weird isometric camera angles, it can be difficult to know how to place the stick so you can wall run or jump up a wall, since it’s never presented clearly. You can be holding the stick to run forward only to jump into a wall, where holding forward now makes you stick to it and jump up. It requires the player to input very specific angles on the spot, which kills the game’s pace.
It may seem like a personal complaint, but when you’re trying to move as quickly as possible, as well as avoiding a myriad of hazards, knowing exactly where to place yourself is critical to your success. While Super Meat Boy 3D isn’t impossible in this regard—any more so than its 2D predecessors—it just ends up being a lot less fun and a lot more frustrating than it should be.
“Super Meat Boy 3D feels less like Mario’s leap into the third dimension and more like Sonic’s…”
Also, and this may be a personal complaint, but I really hate that the game has a suicide button. For some reason, it’s mapped to the Y button, which honestly feels like a cruel joke, since it’s exactly where you’d think the Dash button would be mapped, but it’s completely perfunctory since you would never really need an “unstuck” button in a fast-paced, linear platformer.
Visually, Super Meat Boy 3D is fine, but it feels a bit unpolished. Environments have a nice variety of visual styles, and they’re certainly trying to feel much bigger, with a lot of visual dynamism and action happening within levels. However, certain animations feel a bit stilted, and it’s got that very “made in Unreal” feel that leaves it looking kind of flat and generic. The game covers this with a pretty solid soundtrack that blends rock and techno while maintaining a frenetic pace that suits the fast-paced gameplay.
And despite being a Nintendo Switch 2-specific title, Super Meat Boy 3D doesn’t really feel like it takes advantage of the system. While it looks fine, certain environments can look a bit pixelated and unpolished. While the game runs smoothly for the most part, it never feels like the game is running at a full 1080p in handheld mode. It’s not terrible, but you could’ve told me this was a Nintendo Switch game, and I would believe you.
Super Meat Boy 3D feels less like Mario’s leap into the third dimension and more like Sonic’s. It’s a slippery, unwieldy game that, while possessing the potential for some fun, ends up feeling a lot more aggravating than it should.
Also, the game uses the term “unalive” in a loading screen tip, and I think it thinks it’s making a cute joke, but it just makes me want to lower the review score more.
