Mutant Storm: Reloaded
For Xbox 360.
Verdict: Ride the razor, baby.
Rating: 4/5
If you just did a double-take at the game title above, well spotted - you could be forgiven to thinking that it’s January 2006 because Mutant Storm: Reloaded is about a year old.
As one of the flagship titles for the 360’s downloadable Live Arcade collection, Mutant Storm has been over-shadowed by Geometry Wars’ more iconic vector based warping and an eclipse that i’ve recently just seen past.
For those lucky folks who received Microsoft’s big noisy box for Christmas this is one gem worth seeking out amid the casual game clutter that fills Live Arcade and justification for my year late review.
Taking the twin stick controls first seen in Robotron: 2084 (left stick to move, right stick to fire) and used in other arcade classics like Smash TV (i’d buy that for a dollar!) and of course Geometry Wars, Mutant Storm instils a new sense of urgency and depth into proceedings.
With a retro aesthetic that seems crafted in the late night chill-out rooms of the nineties, Mutant Storm takes its form in a series of roughly 100 varied and abstract rooms full of shrill, multicoloured insectoids, pulsing lasers, gun turrets and subtle background electronica.
Visually it’s anything but subtle with gaudy neon fire burning a hole in your new plasma screen as readily as your streaming bullets eat at the ever marching waves of Y2K bugs and nightmare squidlings.
What it brings to the shoot-em-up sub-genre is an adaptive difficulty level where more points equals increased difficulty. Broken up into a karate style belt system you start on white and work your way up to black. If you lose a life your point multiplyers reset and your belt percentage drops meaning that next difficulty level is further away and so is your high score.
Like the polar opposite to the Weight Watchers plan, more points is what it’s all about - sure you can complete the game on Yellow Belt difficulty but the online leaderboards of the 360 ensure that’s not much to brag about.
With the two player gameplay that Geometry Wars lacks the most, Mutant Storm’s emphasis on speed requires gutsy gameplay and an almost psychic level of control over your twitching, neurotic thumbs.
Life on the edge for 800 MS points.