If you don’t know this already, let me remind you – I love platformers. So when I got an opportunity to play the latest game from Team Meat at PAX West, Super Meat Boy Forever, I couldn’t say yes fast enough. I have played Super Meat Boy a bit on my Vita, and despite being brutally hard, I mostly enjoyed the game. I just didn’t see what they could do to make things a bit different. Which brings us to the demo.
It may surprise some of you to hear that Super Meat Boy Forever is an endless runner. I certainly was surprised. But while most endless runners are mindless and don’t involve much skill, this one very much lives up to the Meat Boy name. You quickly need to adapt to the fact you always are running in the same direction, often towards danger. You can jump over things and do a double jump which makes you punch in front of yourself. You can also hold down to slide and punch your way through narrow apertures. Lastly, you’re capable of a dive to deal death from above. That’s it though, and that simplicity is key to this game being such a success.
In some ways, my complaints about the original Super Meat Boy are alleviated by this design. There’s never any question of whether or not you can make a jump, it’s always about timing. I felt this was more fair, but it by no means made the demo any easier. I was running into plenty of buzz saws and getting pulped by enemies on a regular basis. There’s a certain rhythm to the game, and it makes playing through it a lot more fun. The only overtly challenging part was a boss battle against a giant mechanized saw robot. You had to constantly jump back and forth bashing weak spots on its arms, which prompts the other arm to try and smash you. If you fall too far down one, you’ll land squarely in a woodchipper. Having said that, I almost beat the boss, and was promised the boss will be tweaked to be a bit more fair.
Overall, I was very pleased in my demo of Super Meat Boy Forever. If you’re a fan of Team Meat or just love you some hardcore platforming, you’ll be happy to play this on every console and Steam either Q3 or Q4 of this year. Definitely a sequel worth waiting for.
