Super Meat Boy 3D Is A Messy Attempt At Going 3D

Super Meat Boy serves as the emblem for rigorous precision platforming. The 2010 two-dimensional platformer featuring a chunk of meat was a sensation, partly because the game recognized its own difficulty and emphasized your frequent fatalities by showcasing them all at once when you finally completed a level. I’ve been intrigued to discover how that 2D precision would adapt to a three-dimensional platformer. Regrettably, based on a short gameplay preview, the conclusion is: not particularly well.

My preview encompassed the initial phases of the game, from a few tutorials to a handful of extended levels filled with traps and obstacles. Credit where it’s due, Meat Boy 3D effectively captures the essentials of what you would anticipate from a Super Meat Boy title. You once again embody a soft, squishy piece of fetal, sanguine meat, navigating through perilous stages to rescue your girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from the nefarious Dr. Fetus. At the conclusion of each segment, you reach Bandage Girl, only to see Dr. Fetus whisk her away to the subsequent level. Following this, you witness a replay that simultaneously displays all your attempts, with numerous Meat Boys scrambling ahead, nearly all but one meeting their gruesome demise, encapsulating your adventure through the stage. The irreverent humor is quite familiar, even featuring a little warp pipe joke to nod to Meat Boy’s Super Mario Bros. influences.

Although you possess complete 3D control, in the initial stages I experienced, the layouts conformed to the eight primary compass directions. Similar to its predecessors, Super Meat Boy 3D concentrates on urging you to maneuver through levels as swiftly as conceivable—the tutorials introduce the dash feature early, and you can’t truly gain enough momentum for most jumps without it—and your movement primarily follows straight lines or diagonals. Presumably, this decision is to maintain these first stages easily understandable and to prevent overwhelming the player with an excess of mobility prior to them truly grasping it.

Yet this is insufficient. To begin, these settings are exceptionally cluttered, filled with overgrown foliage, vines, and grass. Subsequent levels delved into musty sewers laden with rust-hued pipes and scaffolding. The original Super Meat Boy managed its lightning-fast pace and merciless hazards because the stage layouts were minimalist and straightforward at a glance.

Super Meat Boy 3D’s settings, in contrast, tend to merge together, rendering it excessively easy to dash directly into a peril before you even comprehend that it is one. And although a portion of the Super Meat Boy experience is learning through failure, these fatalities feel as though they aren’t under your control—especially since you may encounter the identical demise, repeatedly, caused by a trap that isn’t clearly visible.

It doesn’t assist that Meat Boy’s movement feels airy and inaccurate. On this aspect, I have conflicting thoughts, because when I revisit the original Super Meat Boy, the mobility in that game is comparably light, offering ample opportunity to steer Meat Boy mid-jump for challenging leaps and accurate landings. However, with so much increased freedom of movement, that same technique doesn’t translate as effectively here. This is one domain where the 3D adaptation may have adhered too closely to the original material, instead of adjusting to the requirements of a 3D environment. The significant new feature in Meat Boy’s repertoire is a wall run, an inventive addition that seems to blend seamlessly with the catalog of his abilities, yet I never truly mastered how to properly link it with standard jumps, so it too suffered from an airiness and inaccuracy.

The instances when Super Meat Boy 3D excels, oddly enough, occur when it essentially does not act as if it’s a 3D title at all. The camera typically operates like a conventional 2D sidescroller, following Super Meat Boy’s actions from side to side and occasionally downward into the 3D layers. At times, a segment of a level will have you barreling straight ahead, vaulting up a wall, and then leaping between rotating blades, effectively recreating the original Super Meat Boy platforming within a three-dimensional setting. Mechanically, it operates like the 2D edition, and that’s a positive attribute.

Super Meat Boy 3D is scheduled for launch in 2026, allowing the developers ample time to refine and enhance the gameplay. If this 3D title can be adjusted sufficiently to rival the classic 2D platformer, Team Meat may once more possess something remarkable in their grasp. For the time being, however, it’s just as chaotic as Meat Boy himself.