The SuperMeat’s Gone Bad

This new side scrolling platformer from Sourena Games mixes the worlds of cute and cuddly games with murder and frustration in an attempt to drive the player right to the edge of sanity. With having over 60 levels and a challenging pace, this new title will definitely push you to your limits.

Platforming is a well-known and often admired genre of gaming that most start out with and move on from, but find nostalgic later on. With so many choices such as Mario, Mega Man, Contra as the predecessors, there have had to be enhancements beyond just the simple platforming. Some have achieved this growth like Portal with very different gameplay, or Super MeatBoy with is challenge, precise control, fun graphics and insane difficulty. But I’m sorry to say that Wobbly Jungle is just the leftovers from the titans that stand above it, since it just tries to emulate anything that works from others and try to put a fresh coat of paint hoping no one sees the cracks.

The borrowing of elements from other games is a very common practice but it shouldn’t just stop there. Wobbly Jungle borrows its character, difficulty, and movement style from Super MeatBoy, but it’s just a much slower worse looking version, along with the “see where others died” from Super Mario Maker which seems to just be a blatant rip off. The only thing that seems original from the levels is the music, which is actually fairly catchy and easy to listen, but it’s just one track on loop, so no matter how good it is it will wear thin very quickly.

Since platformers require very exact landing and jump points, precision is a key element which is sorely lacking from this game. Even the double jump is very lagging, and with a game with giant saw blades everywhere, that’s just unacceptable. The fun part about other games is the speed at which you can go through a level if your good, but here with so many blind faith jumps and the overall speed of jumping, it just seems to drag on. The fact that most levels look exactly alike does not help this boredom factor at all.

As for graphics, its actually quite colorful and easy to look at, but with that image comes no details whatsoever, just basic colorful shapes that happen to please most people. That’s fine for the background, but when it comes to the giant saw blades, they look like a jr high students first attempt at flash animation. The main characters are just blobs with no definition at all, and so it’s hard to care about what’s going on when you look like everything else in the environment.

I actually applaud Sourena for trying to juxtapose the cute and cuddly kids’ games with sawblades and blood, but while the idea is sound, the execution was sloppy at best. Never building on any of those that came before won’t get you much. In the end just like all knockoffs before it, some people will like it for its price tag ($5) or for its colorful look, but will more than likely never play it beyond a few levels.