Team Meat’s 2D platformer sets the steaks high!

Oct 03, 2015  Super Meat Boy composer refuses to license the original soundtrack for PS4. Are you down to play Super Meat Boy again on Nintendo Switch?. Minor complaints aside, Super Meat Boy on the Switch is a fine port of the game. While the Race Mode is an interesting addition, it’s not necessarily a reason to go out and buy this game, yet again. If you’ve yet to play it though, Super Meat Boy is a modern indie classic.

For those of you that have been living under a rock for the past decade, Super Meat Boy is a notoriously challenging yet superb platformer that helped kickstart the current indie game boom due to its appearance in Indie Game: The Movie.

Controlling the titular Meat Boy, you are tasked with rescuing Meat Boy’s girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from the evil Dr. Fetus. This sees you needing to traverse over 300 levels across multiple chapters – using some of the finest and tightest platforming controls to do so. Now, 300 levels may sound daunting but each one takes less than 30 seconds to complete once you’ve mastered the controls and figured out the optimal route.

Until you do that, however, you will probably die a lot trying! Super Meat Boy will test your ability to bounce around each stage in the fastest way possible, requiring the most precise movement and button presses. Luckily, the game is a dream to control and is extremely responsive – using a very simple scheme of analogue stick to move, A to jump and ZR to run. This allows you to put all your focus into the on-screen action as you attempt to clear each level in record time. Once you complete a level, you are presented with one of my favourite features – a replay of your run (or runs – depending on how often you failed) that shows you all of your attempts. There’s something a tad sadistic about watching the many Meat Boys die repeatedly while one makes it successfully to the end goal but it does further boost that feeling of achievement once you’ve cleared a particularly tricky level.

There are also online leaderboards for you to compare your clearance times with either your friend list or the world, and beating a stage below the par time will see you awarded with an A+ ranking that will open up the even harder version of said stage in the game’s infamous Dark World. Not only satisfied with giving you these extra difficult versions of the base levels, there are also Warp Zones dotted around levels that will whisk you off to mini-worlds inspired by other indie games and retro titles – giving you three lives to complete these with new characters available to use if you manage to do so.

If you thought Super Meat Boy couldn’t get any better, one awesome new addition in the Nintendo Switch version is “Race Mode”. You and a friend can take a JoyCon each and race head to head through either a single chapter or a bunch of random levels. This makes for a lot of fun and, equally, a lot of cursing and laughter as you take each other on.

There’s a reason that Super Meat Boy is often heralded as one of the best 2D platformers of recent times and, with the addition of Race Mode, the Nintendo Switch version is arguably the best version yet of the game. With all of its charm still intact, and the controls still superb, this challenging but fair game is as awesome as ever. Sure, the soundtrack isn’t as good as the original but it is still full of banging rock tunes and the multiplayer is fantastic fun – making Team Meat’s game worth buying all over again!

Summary

One of the best 2D platformers of the last decade, Super Meat Boy lands on the Nintendo Switch and delivers, arguably, the best version of Team Meat’s game yet. The Race Mode is a fantastic addition provides a riotous multiplayer experience to what was already a superb package. If you’re a fan of challenging platformers and have never played Super Meat Boy before, this is essential. If you’ve already played it, it’s still as awesome as ever – with the added bonus of Race Mode.

Super Meat Boy (Switch eShop) Review Mini

by Zachary Miller - January 22, 2018, 10:35 pm PST
Total comments: 2

The game is still great; the music, not so much.

Because the game is more than seven years old now, I’m going to assume the majority of you are at least passively familiar with Super Meat Boy. If you’re not, maybe check out Daan Koopman’s review of the Wii U version. Pretty much everything Daan says there also applies here, and I’m going to talk about the things I particularly like/dislike about this version of Super Meat Boy. As a baseline, I love this game to death—I bought a used Xbox 360 specifically to play it all those many years ago.

Super Meat Boy on Switch is exactly as advertised: Super Meat Boy—but on Switch, making it portable. Yes, the game appeared on Vita several years back, but I cannot imagine playing it on that small screen, as everything is already very small. In fact, there are times where playing it in off the TV where some things (like keys) are a little too hard to make out unless your nose is up against the glass.

That said, having a portable version of Super Meat Boy is fantastic, especially now that I’ve played its spiritual successor, The End is Nigh. Switch functionality brings a couple new features to the table, such as leaderboards for every stage that rank folks based on completion time. I suspect this may elicit the kind of friendly rivalries among NWR staffers last seen in Runner 2, though I don’t see an option to only display friends’ times. Brand-new to this version of Super Meat Boy is a split-screen two-player mode in which each player takes a Joy-Con (or controller) to see who can beat an entire level first. I can’t quite recommend this for tabletop mode, because chopping the Switch’s screen in half makes very small things downright microscopic. However, it’s a great time on your TV. I will warn you that this is not a game to play with people who don’t play a lot of 2D platformers. They will quickly become frustrated.

But we have to talk about the elephant in the room: the soundtrack. As you may or may not be aware, the original Xbox 360 version of Super Meat Boy came with an exceptional hard-rockin’ soundtrack by Danny Baranowsky. You can listen to it here thanks to the power of the Internet. When the game was ported to Sony systems, Baranowsky chose not to license the music and so a new soundtrack was hastily throw together by various artists and implemented in the Sony, and all subsequent ports, of Super Meat Boy. Taken by itself, there is nothing inherently wrong with this new soundtrack…but it just can’t compete with Baranowsky’s iconic original. My solution has been to mute the TV and listen to Baranowsky’s soundtrack on my phone. Your mileage with that technique may vary. I want to stress that the soundtrack issue in no way compromises how good Super Meat Boy is from a gameplay perspective, but it doesn’t sound the same anymore and that makes me sad.

One thing I do appreciate about Super Meat Boy is that you can sort of tailor the difficulty to your personal preference. Just critical-path'ing the game isn’t that bad, but then you might try to get all the bandages and warp zones, which adds a layer of difficulty. After that, you might try to get A+ grades on every normal stage in order to unlock the dark version of that stage, which is another feat. And then, if you really want to torture yourself, you might go after all the bandages and warp zones in the dark stages, which is straight-up masochism.

It feels great to be playing Super Meat Boy again, despite the soundtrack problem. I can’t say enough good things about it, but you should know that the difficulty ramps up pretty steadily and somewhere during the third world, the gloves really come off. Enjoy the Warp Zone of World 5-7, kids! If you can find a similarly-experienced buddy, the two-player race is really quite fun.

Summary

Pros

• Easy to learn, difficult to master
• Seemingly endless varieties of challenge
• This is just an amazing game

Cons

• Shame about that soundtrack
• Some stages are just hopelessly, agonizingly difficult, especially if you're going for 100%
• The game's few boss battles aren't especially good

Talkback

So if I never played the original I wouldn't have any issue with the music, right?

Probably not, no. And don't click that link to the original soundtrack either, lest your eyes be opened.

Worldwide Releases