The original Super Meat Boy was built all around speed and precision; regularly demanding players make unbelievable jumps at high velocity, land on a box the size of Meat Boy himself, jump again while maintaining momentum, all while avoiding saw blades, insta-death salt waterfalls, and all forms of other hazards along the way. That’s hard enough to do in 2D, so the idea of requiring that level of precision while also contending with a Z-Axis made the thought of a 3D Super Meat Boy seem like an unsolvable puzzle.
I’ll say straight up that even though the attempt is respectable, Super Meat Boy 3D does not completely solve this problem. Far too many of my deaths came from frustratingly jumping straight towards a wall or platform, only to find out that I was actually slightly behind or slightly in front of it, causing poor Meat Boy to jump towards nothing and turn into super meat paste. Fortunately, levels are so short and respawns are so quick that deaths are just a slight inconvenience, and much of that frustration is forgivable when you consider how well developers Sluggerfly and Team Meat have managed to preserve the spirit and unique feel of Meat Boy, resulting in an uneven, but nevertheless entertaining follow-up to an all-time classic.
If you’re unfamiliar with the 2010 Xbox Live Arcade original, Super Meat Boy was a 2D platformer about a cube of meat, chasing after an evil fetus in a suit and top hat, trying to save his girlfriend, who happens to be a cube of bandages. Levels were lightning quick, often lasting no more than 30-45 seconds, enabling the level design to focus on extremely difficult and hyper-precise platforming that you were expected to die over and over again to.
The easiest way to describe Super Meat Boy 3D then, is to simply point at the title. This is the same Super Meat Boy, but as a 3D precision platformer instead of a 2D one. The story of Meat Boy chasing Dr. Fetus is the same, there are once again five worlds, each world is capped off with a boss battle that mostly just requires you to dodge three phases of increasingly difficult hazards, there are Dark World versions of every level unlocked by getting A+ ranks on the Light World versions, and unlockable guest characters from a variety of other indie games gained finding hidden bandages within a level.
It’s a formula that works to great effect once again, providing players of different skill levels with a layered set of goals with satisfying rewards that all serve to expand what would otherwise be a relatively short run time. The base goal of beating all of the light world levels took me about 4 hours, then I spent another four hours getting A+ ranks on all of those levels to unlock the Dark World levels, and now I’m in the middle of a Dark World playthrough, and after that I could look towards finding all of the bandages and unlocking all of the characters, which is a daunting task since not only do you have to find the hidden bandage in a level, but you also have to clear it without dying with the bandage in tow. So while the base game is fairly short, getting everything Super Meat Boy 3D has to offer will take quite a bit of time, and the completionist route has some tantalizing rewards in the form of more levels and characters that each approach levels in a different way.
The Dreaded Z-Axis
On the gameplay side of things, Super Meat Boy 3D does a great job of translating the feel and movement of Meat Boy into the third dimension. He’s super fast, stops on a dime, can either leap 50 yards ahead with a full press and hold of the jump button, or do the shortest of short hops with just a light tap of it, conveniently giving him just enough height to jump over a saw blade. The level design, especially in the harder stages demands a lot from the player, and fortunately the controls are tight enough to enable you to meet those demands.
That said, there’s certainly a learning curve when it comes to controlling Meat Boy in 3D. By default, Meat Boy’s movement snaps in 45 degree increments, even when using the control stick, meaning he basically can only run in 8 directions. For some levels, this is helpful because it prevents you from drifting to a side when all you need to do is or jump in a straight line. That slight amount of drift could be all that it takes to make you unaligned with an upcoming platform or wall. But on the other side of that, being restricted to only 8 directions can make movement feel imprecise and sticky. It’s a learning curve that I eventually overcame, but it never feels perfect, which is a word I would use to describe the controls and feel of the original game.
Sluggerfly and Team Meat smartly added a new air dash ability to Meat Boy’s limited repertoire of techniques that allows him to instantly halt his momentum and dash in a direction, which is great because it’s much harder to judge distance in 3D than it is in 2D, and having the ability to instantly correct yourself if you overshot a jump, or quickly latch on to a wall after leaping around a corner is a godsend. Not to mention it makes for great high risk movement tech since you can do a short hop into an airdash for a quick boost of speed that’s faster than just straight up running, which is especially fun when trying to find ways to shave off an extra second or two of your fastest times while going for A+ ranks.
The level design does a good job of introducing new hazards and types of platforming challenges at a steady pace to keep the game fresh. You’ll go from straight forward obstacle courses where you just need to hop on a bunch of platforms while avoiding all varieties of sawblades, to vertically oriented levels that have you sliding down walls and making leaps of faith through openings in the ground, to speed focused levels where you have to move fast to avoid getting exploded by missile turrets, etc. Every level has a distinct feel, and even while they might use the same traps or hazards, they always twist them in a certain way that makes them feel new.
Despite that though, the actual quality of levels in Super Meat Boy 3D is pretty inconsistent, and the bad ones are usually bad because of perspective issues. There is a little red ring that always appears underneath your character to let you know where they actually are, relative to the ground, but the ground isn’t always at eye level, and when you’re making giant leaps over large gaps in an attempt to wall cling to platform that’s off center, trying to find the right angle to approach from can feel like a guessing game that usually ends up in death. Dying is all part of the process in SMB3D, with each death teaching you a lesson about timing, or a trap that came out too fast for you to react to on the first go around, or how hard you should be pressing the jump button, etc. But deaths to perspective or camera issues don’t teach anything. They’re just empty lessons that do nothing but build frustration.