Review: Super Meat Boy 3D - Madness in Three Dimensions

The Super Meat Boy series represents a significant milestone in my journey as a gamer, and as someone who grew up on the original game alongside The Binding of Isaac, the announcement of the beloved Meat Boy's return in a new game—one that attempts to innovate and literally give us an additional dimension—in hopes of restoring it to greatness after some less-quality sequels, was nothing short of enormous for me. And now, after quite a few long hours of repeated attempts accompanied by the urge to throw my computer out the window (in a good way), it can be said with confidence: Super Meat Boy 3D is a very respectable addition to the Super Meat Boy arsenal of games, but does the 3D here take this game to new dimensions? Let's dive into the review.

The Legacy

Like story? Too bad. Super Meat Boy 3D doesn't really try to give us depth or branching storylines, and like all the other games in the series, everything here is pushed aside in favor of a single focus on the relentless action this game will deliver—making it one of the most challenging platformers I've played in recent years. Super Meat Boy 3D puts us in the "shoes" of Meat Boy, a cute red meat boy trying to rescue his girlfriend Bandage Girl from the clutches of the evil Dr. Fetus, who kidnapped her as an act of jealousy. In principle, there is a kind of story thread that's even accompanied throughout the game by some very polished 3D cinematics (especially compared to what we were used to getting from the original game and those that followed), but as I said, this is perhaps the least exciting thing here, so let's dive straight into the meat of the matter and talk about the gameplay itself.

The name Super Meat Boy precedes it, and for good reason: the original game was and remains in many people's eyes as a memory that brings with it lots of good memories and enjoyment, but also those moments that every self-respecting gamer experiences at some point in their life where all you want to do is punch the screen in front of you. It's important to note that this is far from the first platformer to be defined as "impossibly hard"—there were many good ones that did it before—but something about Super Meat Boy's relative simplicity is what I think managed to capture the audience (and the critics—a score of 90 on Metacritic for a game in this style in those days is not something that comes easily). Just to put things in perspective for you—the original game in the series launched in 2010, a year in which we received, among other things, the excellent but also relatively challenging Super Mario Galaxy 2 (at least in its later stages), and less than a year after the game's launch we got none other than the original Dark Souls, which once again defined what we today call an "insurmountable challenge"—needless to say, it wasn't easy being a gamer in those days.

The Third Dimension

As far as its structure goes, Super Meat Boy 3D is a relatively classic platformer—the game world is divided into levels, where in each level we need to get from the starting point to the end, while on the way to that coveted finish line we'll face quite a few brutal obstacles in the form of spikes, sharp gears, robots that will try to cut us in half, and a whole host of other traps, alongside the structure of the levels themselves and the platforms that make up each stage, which are of course positioned precisely so that each level moves with terrifying accuracy on the border between "a rewarding experience for those who know what they're doing" and "God forbid, there's no way this shit is possible." Here too, like all the series' games, the main goal is to try to complete the stage as fast as possible (each level has a predefined time target we need to try to beat), and in addition to this element, there are also bandages hidden in each level that we can collect—of course, unlike "normal" games, in Super Meat Boy 3D you'll need to collect the bandage but also successfully reach the end of the level with it, so if you decided to try and collect them all, keep in mind that it's not that simple. The variety of the levels themselves is also excellent, and as you progress, the types of obstacles and the challenge of overcoming them only increases—an excellent execution in this regard for the vast majority of the time.

Collecting a certain amount of bandages will unlock the ability to play with more characters, which function mainly as cosmetic gear for your experience and at least for me as a kind of "trophy cabinet" for knowing what you're doing and having managed to collect a fairly impressive amount of bandages. Completing a level under its defined time threshold will award you an "+A" grade for that level and also unlock its "Dark World" version, which is essentially a crazier, harder, and simply more unfair version of the level. Every few levels you'll reach a challenging boss stage that will test your timing and platforming senses even more, with each such boss stage trying to "summarize" the levels you've passed up to that point in terms of the boss stage's structure and the battle itself. Personally, I really loved the exploration experience of the levels and the way the bandages hide in them—the direct result here is that Super Meat Boy 3D, just like its predecessors, knows how to play on that string in your body that will make you try to play the same level again and again and again, and again, just to get a millisecond better final time score, and immediately after you'll enter another long but enjoyable session trying to collect that level's lost bandage and then also complete it, again.

Transitioning a 2D platformer to a 3D format gives it quite a few new possibilities, and rest assured that Super Meat Boy 3D doesn't spare in utilizing the new and cool resource it received here: the level structure in Super Meat Boy 3D makes good and sometimes brilliant use of the fact that there's now depth of field to each level, with some platforms positioned in a way that will require us to understand that we need to advance "into the depth" of the screen and not just to its flat sides, which adds a pretty amazing level of challenge to this already-difficult game since now not only do you need to jump from place to place at the most appropriate time, but you also need to make sure you're landing properly on the next platform in line, which may be positioned in a deeper section relative to the platform you just left, and of course here too the level structure is built so that you'll almost always need to land very precisely on your next platform, otherwise some friendly disc saw will just be waiting to slice you in two without any mercy. This is without a shadow of a doubt, at least in my opinion, the hardest and most brutal Super Meat Boy game we've gotten to date, and therefore I would recommend it mainly to experienced series players who know what they're getting into, while for new players I feel the series' 2D experience would be much more relevant and accessible.

The meat boy's ability arsenal was and remains quite basic in this game as well, where beyond our ability to move from place to place around the level, we can jump distances, run, slide on walls, climb them by jumping, and perhaps most importantly—perform a kind of Dash that will significantly increase our jump range but also dangerously reduce our possible reaction window for any action we perform immediately after that satisfying Dash—a no less than perfect execution in my opinion of risk versus reward. Here too, similar to the series' original experience, Super Meat Boy 3D's accuracy regarding response times is quite good, although personally there were cases where I felt the 3D walls were closing in on me to a level where I said to myself more than a few times "come on really, in 2D I definitely would have passed this." I'll extend this claim toward the game and say there was a relatively large number of levels where I felt the really successful 3D of this game came directly at its own expense, with most of the times this happened being related to a challenging position of a certain platform relative to the camera angle available to me, or the level's depth of field wasn't clear and as a result I was also disqualified in those levels more than once. That said, this could totally be translated to me just being a not-so-good player, although I happened to ask colleagues who tested the game themselves and their opinion on the matter was pretty identical to mine, so I'll continue forward and hold onto the claim that the game is the problem, not me.

It's important for me to note that even in light of the small problem I mentioned here, from the original Super Meat Boy until today it's been hard for me to say that the sequels of this series provided us with the level of challenge and enjoyment that that iconic 2010 game managed to deliver (and I'm far from being an "elite gamer" when it comes to my platforming abilities, if that wasn't clear from the previous paragraph), but with Super Meat Boy 3D? Beyond the fact that it looks great and feels great, I must and want to note to you that if you're like me and the series' sequels didn't quite sit well with you, you're going to be no less than very satisfied—the level quality of Super Meat Boy 3D is excellent, they have great structure, good pacing, and a level of challenge that as mentioned moves on the scale I described earlier with frightening accuracy, sometimes even too accurate.

I mentioned the performance aspect in passing so let me expand a bit: I played the game on PC, where the experience was smooth, responsive, and definitely great, alongside the game's excellent graphics that also don't spare in the amounts of blood and madness it will throw at us along the way and also make sure to provide us with a no less than stunning color palette that greatly enriches the experience. The game's soundtrack is great, even if not exceptionally innovative, and it overall integrates wonderfully with the overall quality level of this game.

The Bottom Line

Super Meat Boy 3D is an excellent game—it does a lot of things right regarding its platforming experience, and even if there are cases where it can feel cramped and a bit less comfortable due to the transition to 3D, the vast majority of the time we have here a quality, brutal, and insanely fun platformer that will challenge your senses in a way that greatly respects them. So was the transition to 3D necessary? Not necessarily—I think a new game packed with new levels to try for the meat boy is a blessed thing regardless of its graphics format, but relative to itself and other games in the genre, there's no doubt we have here a quality execution that's totally worth your time.