Fans of Speedrunner and platformers know everything about Super Meat Boy. It was an infamous Flash game for two things: the strict timing of the jumps to avoid peril and how quickly you can complete a level. Some players even took it to another level where no passed away race was involved. It was one of the games that had priority over the ridiculous Hardcore platforms that are spinning in the video game industry these days.
Keyword almost a decade after, a sequel called Super Meat Boy Forever was released last year for the PC (via Epic Games) and Nintendo Switch systems, while after this year the other consoles and Steam arrived on the market. One of the most important and perhaps the most important changes in this sequel is that it is now an automatic runner, whereas in the previous game you could control the meat plate where you went and what you want to do. In my opinion, this fundamentally changes the game, because even if the bread and butter of Super Meat Boy is there (running, jumping, dodging circular saws, not being killed, etc.), it is important that you do not get injured.), a player would still play an Autorunner and a platformer in a different way.
Let me explain. With an Autorunner, the pace of a level is constant. Although there are ways to slow down Meat Boy (who settled down with wife and child after the events of the first game) by jumping and sliding slowly on the walls or clinging to the yellow bumpers, these are predetermined at certain levels and are not always guaranteed. You can also speed up Meat Boy with his strike, which you often have to do to complete certain parts of a level.
In a platform game where you can control the movement, you get a respite from the Chaos. I understand that the levels of Super Meat Boy Forever are fast, but they are terribly frustrating, especially since you are constantly running through those buzz saws that are chasing you and not trying to fall into a pit, as well as kill enemies without finishing you. If it was a platformer, I might take a second or two to figure out what to do and where to go next. Failure in this Autorunner seems inexpensive and frustrating.
Frustrating to the point that I would completely Pass away on some levels after passed away even before I could hit the pause button; it’s really that annoying. The game wouldn’t even stop the meat plate from running after it returned from a checkpoint. Come on, come on, come on. It doesn’t even look like the first game where you have to fine-tune your Timing and jumps (especially running, stopping and jumping from a certain point) to get that one-level deathless run. In Super Meat Boy Forever, you rely more on luck to get this race without passed away.
I’m not sure what the developers, Team Meat, were thinking when they chose Super Meat Boy Forever to be a car racer. I wonder if you were thinking, “Hey, maybe it would take the player the burden of holding down the direction button to run back and forth, and still let it go forward.”Again, that wouldn’t be the matter, because a lot of the levels require you to jump on the walls to go back, just to go back to another wall to go forward.
Anyway, Super Meat Boy Forever has some improvements over the first game. First of all, you don’t always need to use Meat Boy as a character. You can choose a character after unlocking it by going through the story and collecting the collectibles. Collectibles are also new in this sequel. You can collect these items in the levels which, to be honest, are the most difficult parts of these levels.
It’s easy to see how fans of The OG Super Meat Boy Forever aren’t living up to the hype of its predecessor. This can be a master class on how changing one aspect of a game’s sequel can really change the way it’s played and recorded by Fans. He also shows that “why fix what is not broken?”applies to video games as well as to other areas of life.