izigame.me

Unfortunately, Dr. Fetus' Mean Meat Machine fails to deliver on what could have been a knockout idea.
Similar to Super Meat Boy Forever, my criticism whittles down to "There was an idea here". Forever could have been a simple autorunner with some more controls to deviate it from the rest and have a focus on open ended level design that was intuitive and fun to explore. Sadly, a lot of primarily arbitrary factors bogs it down and makes it a frustrating game to complete.
This game is no different. This is a simple puzzle game where you create combos. Create enough combos, and you finish the level. Sadly, there are traps that aren't added in naturally, but stapled onto the grid to limit the game space and slow down your progress, forcing you to hold the UP input to slow your pieces' descent. If the traps were designed in a way that had them going up and were contingent on you moving side to side to avoid them, it would be a different story. It's similar to where I work, I'll be shrink-wrapping a palette and someone will walk by, forcing me to stop and wait for them to pass. This is just my work: the game, and it's a frustrating feeling that plagues this game.
Additionally, some traps destroy the pieces that you put down, which disincentizes and makes it nigh impossible for you to making multiple combos. The invincibility you're granted for your descending pieces is nice, but it would have been much better for invincibility to be granted to all of your pieces, so those delicious combos can formulate and harken back to the original Puyo Puyo in which quick thinking is paramount to your success.
If the traps aren't bad enough, there's an arbitrary A+ ranking that was added to further extenuate the game's 100% completion. I could understand if the game was centered around going slowly and not worrying about time, but the A+ times, similar to Forever, act as a speedrun time for you to reach with a small margin for error, and not a general benchmark as to how you should be performing. Forcing the player to go quickly with all that I mentioned makes this game closer to frustrating and far less free flowing than other puzzle games that don't include this arbitrary time limit. It would have been a much better choice if the A+ times were tied to getting through without dying, and there even exists a feature that lets you restart the level to the very beginning that better supports this line of thinking.
Ever present defenders of the new Meat Boy games will tell you to play the game for a solid chunk of time to really understand the game before posting a negative review. I played the game enough, and I can tell you with certainty what the primary game loop is: memorizing a certain pattern that your pieces can go in, with most other puzzle games being about quick thinking and no proper way to play that allows you to get ahead. If this seems appealing to you, that's fine, but it isn't Meat Boy. Nor is it a fun way to structure a puzzle game of this kind.
This was meant to be an "experimental" title, but touching a preexisting formula and adding things on top of it isn't my idea of an experiment. Throwing M&M's and Twizzlers on top of a piece of steak isn't an experiment. I've nearly come to terms with the effortless cutscenes, music and story present in these new games, which was the inverse in the original Super Meat Boy that made it stand out amongst other colorful and unpolished indie titles, and now I'm looking for the games to be fun on their own and stand on their own two feet without the assets of Meat Boy thrown on top of them. This is not that game. Hopefully the developers take some of what I've said to heart and can make some adjustments, but as of now, this piece of meat you've come to love is spoiled rotten with another disappointing title that no one asked for.