Publisher: Renegade Kid
Developer: Renegade Kid
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Win 7, 1.8 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, DirectX 9-compatible graphics card, 23 MB hard-drive space
Genre: Platformer
ESRB rating: Everyone
Release date: Available now

Retro-nostalgia is a many-layered cake. One one level, it can simply be a way to advertize that “I remember my childhood.” That’s why Walmart sells shirts with the NES controller over the word “addict,” despite the fact that whoever actually buys those shirts likely spends far more time yelling at 10-year-olds on Xbox Live than actually interacting with their NES. But rose-colored glasses aside, there’s a general feeling that gaming has lost something. Don’t be so ignorant to ignore that we’ve also gained so very much, but it’s OK to acknowledge that perhaps there’s something nestled within the pixels of a 2D platformer that you won’t find inside the quad-core renderings of a blockbuster game. It’s from here that Mutant Mudds comes. It has it’s own reason to exist, but it’s heart is in love with the past, for better or worse.

Mutant Mudds is unabashedly steeped in retro-nostalgia. The setup is told through a refreshingly quick cutscene. Aliens invade, you grab your jetpack and ray gun and go! Pixel art isn’t a dead art form, and it’s well expressed throughout. Even the music sounds like it’s right off of an 2a03 chip. The look and feel of Mutant Mudds can be summed up in a word: authentic.

It’s a basic coin-snatching platformer, but the twist here is that you can jump between the foreground and background. Occasionally you reach a point where you can leap into either perspective, effectively creating three different 2D levels that you play in parallel. Meanwhile, as you leap about, you blast mutants using your ray gun and hover about with your jetpack, which doubles as an “oops” button to help you out with failed jumps.

All those coins you collect don’t just go for extra lives. You save them up to buy upgrades. Eventually you hit a wall in a level and you have to go back to the store to swap out for higher jumping power, a better jetpack, etc. It’s a good modern mechanic that’s well implemented to give a better sense of progression to the leaping and shooting action.

Mutant Mudds doesn’t just look old school, it plays like it, too. You have three hearts of health. Once that’s gone, you start the level again. “Ahah!” I hear you say, “finally a game that respects my skills!” However, after a few levels, you begin to see why things such as “health pickups” and “checkpoints” were invented. It took me a half-dozen tries to finish the second level, which lasts a good five minutes. That’s not to say it’s a particularly difficult game; the difficulty curve has a few ill-placed spikes in the way.

Mutant Mudds is a neo-retro trip with its heart in the right place. The lack of health pickups and checkpoints makes some of the longer missions a chore, but otherwise it’s pretty well built. If you enjoyed Duke Nukem before the shotguns and strippers, then there’s likely a place in your heart that Mutant Mudds can fill.

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