NOTE: This game was given to me by the developer for review purposes. This did not influence my review in any way.
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---------------------------------------OVERVIEW-------------------------------------
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Molemen Must Die! is a frantic falling platform shooter from new indie developer, Mokomoto.
Each game starts with King Moleman assaulting the American president and the president replying immediately by releasing a huge bomb down into the moleman tunnels. You play an unnamed female soldier whose task is to accompany the bomb downwards, fending off moleman defenders until, presumably, the bomb reaches the bottom and destroys moleman civilisation forever. (I haven't got anywhere near that far yet.)
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----------------------------------------QUALITY-------------------------------------
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Graphics - The graphics in Molemen Must Die! are pixel graphics with a good dosing of personality, although they can be somewhat hard to discern on occasion; I wasn't sure of the protagonist's gender until she was killed for the first time.
The molemen come in a number of shapes, sizes, colours, and abilities, and generally look cute, if deadly. And weapons and special effects are nicely done, with pixels flying everywhere, though bullets are rather large in comparison to the characters.
There are no graphics quality settings; full-screen/windowed mode, resolution, and a 'VHS' filter that makes the game look like it's played on an old TV are all that is included. (I turned this filter off immediately.)
Sound - Sound is repetitive, but good. There are only two music tracks, I think, but both of them fit the frantic game play. Weapon sounds and explosions are good and normalised for volume, and the protagonist's scream when she dies is a fine end to the game's action.
I'm in two minds as to whether less is more in this case, or whether the game would be better if there were a lot of crazy, gibbering, mole-men sounds as well. Regardless, what's here now works well.
Gameplay - Molemen Must Die! is played as a side-on two-dimensional action platformer. The giant bomb that you are protecting falls continuously down the screen, keeping the action moving downwards. If you touch the top of the screen of fall off the bottom then you die. If a moleman hits you (once), you get shot (once), or you're caught by a mole device or explosion (once), then you die. The goal really is to last as long as you can before the inevitable happens, amassing points for dealing out crazy moleman death as much as you can.
The molemen aren't just gunning for you, though. If you don't kill them quickly enough, they'll jump onto the giant bomb and flail away at it, gradually decreasing its health. If that gets to zero then you guessed it: you die.
Controller controls are simple, with left stick moving you around, A button jumping, X button shooting, and RT to use your rare super bombs, that destroy all moles on the screen. If you're insane (or you don't have a controller, I suppose), you can play with the keyboard, but controller is definitely best.
In a stroke of genius, the developers added an element of randomness in the form of active effects. You have three active effects at any one time (once you've played your third game, at least). At the start of each game the oldest effect drops off and a random new one takes its place. Each effect thus lasts for three games. You have no choice in these effects, and they range from truly excellent (a gun that shoots both left and right at once), to the weird (a rainbow trail that does nothing useful), to the downright annoying (huge molemen, or faster spawning molemen). They can thus change the difficulty significantly between games, and add a good dose of variation to what is otherwise a fairly repetitive game.
Each game you start off with your trusty semi-automatic pistol. Stay with this too long, though, and your thumb will get very sore and tired from pressing the 'X' button. Luckily, random weapon drops are fairly frequent, although somewhat limited in choice, at least to begin with.
As you kill molemen, they drop little XP orbs. Pick up enough of these and you gain a level, which seems to have only one effect: unlocking a new weapon. So the more you play, the more variation you'll see in weapons when you play again. I don't know how many weapons and thus levels are in the game, but so far I've seen machine guns, miniguns, rocket launchers, firebombs, homing missiles, shotguns, and mines, I think.
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Pros:
+ A good sense of humour
+ Good controller response; I didn't often feel that the controls were to blame for my failure
+ Mostly nice pixel graphics and good sound
+ The three random active effects add some variation and replayability
+ Leaderboard and silly messages displayed after each game
+ Steam Achievements and Trading Cards
Cons:
- Not enough weapon variation, at least in the early game
- It's sometimes hard to see what's going on
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--------------------------------------CONCLUSION-----------------------------------
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Molemen Must Die! is a great first entry for Mokomoto on Steam. It has just the right amounts of addictiveness and randomness, and its gameplay is very frantic, but lots of fun. It's a simple game, but therein lies its appeal.
[h1]7/10[/h1]
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