Dr. Fetus' Mean Meat Machine Review (Circuit)
I'll be honest, if your game is only fun when you're using cheats, you know there's an issue.
I love puzzle games to death, and the moment I heard about a Meatboy Puzzle game inspired by Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine was being made, I was so excited, especially after enjoying the Binding of Isaac spin off... The Legend of Bumbo! ...but frankly, this game is design wise broken on a fundamental level...
The gist is... the game is built around avoiding stage hazards, and I kinda get the idea, but the issue is it completely goes against the appeal of Puyo Puyo. Puyo Puyo is at it's best when you're quickly and carefully placing pieces in formations that result in massive satisfying chain reactions, and this game clearly understands that, because it explains thoroughly in the tutorial that you want to go for chains, yet every single level in the game besides the very first punishes you for even trying to set up any sort of chains.
Hell, the game even contradicts the appeal of Meat Boy too! Meat Boy's appeal comes from lightning fast skill based tight movement where one slip up is YOUR fault, and you restart quickly right back where you left. This game feels like the complete antithesis to that philosophy, as it's super slow, you're forced to move down so deaths feel like they're out of your control, especially when some stages are just blatantly too much , and the difficulty comes down to frustration rather than a genuine challenge, and to top it all off, you get put back so far due to how the checkpoints work. I understand why the checkpoints work the way they do, you wouldn't want to restart immediately where you were because it leads to death loops, and you don't want a full restart because that's too punishing, but frankly it seems bad no matter what way you handle it... which to me sounds like it's a blatant design issue.
There is one upside to this though, if you play with the invincibility cheat (yes, I know, literally cheating to enjoy a game) then the game actually resembles something fun! Rather than trying to play the game version of playing "Stick your sausage through a Cheerio", you're instead being fast, placing pieces quickly to avoid hazards destroying them, all while trying to build chains as quickly and efficiently as possible, rewarding your skill at making chains and being fast at it!
If this game is available on sale for about $5 in the future, or you really have nothing else to spend 10 bucks on, then as long as you play with invincibility on this game can be fun as a time waster, as it does have genuinely great animation and music to keep you glued to the screen, it HAS that Meat Boy charm... it's just so fundamentally flawed that it's genuinely hard to look past it's issues, even if you have a lot of patience like I do...