The announcement that Cuphead is Switch-bound was greeted with overwhelming approval from Nintendo fans, although there's probably one person who'll be slightly peeved to see the beautiful boss-battler landing on the handheld mid-April. You see, Mechstermination Force is the latest game from Bertil Hörberg – the Swedish developer behind the excellent little run-and-gun game Gunman Clive (and its sequel) – and, on paper, it shares plenty with Studio MDHR’s game. This is actually a smaller, more contained experience along the lines of Hörberg’s previous games and, in many ways, it may be a refreshing tonic for players turned off by Cuphead’s unforgiving difficulty, but the timing of its release is unfortunate because this is a fun little platforming boss-rush shooter with plenty of personality that deserves to be played.
Choosing from one of four characters (they all handle identically, and you can even play as Gunman Clive if you own the HD Collection on Switch), you’ll be fighting an invasion of building-sized robots and returning to base camp between bouts where your injured buddies hang out and make comical excuses for their absenteeism. The chatter with your comrades features some excellent interstitial writing with nods to Gunman Clive and the absurdity of the situation. You needn’t talk to anybody if you just want to fight, but everyone’s got something amusing to say.
Controls are simple, with ‘B’ to jump and ‘Y’ to fire. Hitting ‘A’ cycles through your weapons and ‘X’ delivers a melee bow with a character-specific implement (our Rambo-style dude used an electric guitar). Red targets are susceptible only to this form of attack, whereas yellow/orange targets are vulnerable to anything. Holding any of the shoulder buttons puts you into a crouch and firing while crouched locks you in position giving you freedom to aim. As with the Clive games, controls feel solid, tight and responsive, with 60fps gameplay locked for all but the biggest mechsplotions – and the odd drop or two had us thinking back to the times in old games when slowdown almost felt impressive – man, this boss is so awesome the game can barely contain it! On the whole it’s an exceptionally smooth experience and the odd drop certainly never affected our enjoyment.
There are fourteen MegaMechs to defeat. The battles themselves are much more interesting than the standard ‘three-hits-and-done’ variety and feature some excellent boss design. Perhaps the most intriguing are the mechs that you journey ‘through’, blasting armour plates from their bodies as you go and navigating to their weak points. Hörberg’s own description of the game as a blend of Contra and Shadow of the Colossus is apt; the game is at its best when it leans towards the latter and you're clambering up the mechanical bodies.
Destroying the mechs earns you money to be spent with Mr McShopkeep. In addition to the gear which unlocks as you progress – boots that enable you to double jump, for example, or Magnet Gloves for climbing and hanging from metal surfaces, activated when you crouch – new weapons such as the Laser Gun or Spread Gun can be purchased once you’ve saved some cash, enabling you to battle more efficiently and get a better rating. The weapons offer a pleasing range of styles – we particularly enjoyed the bomb launcher and the laser which rebounds off multiple surfaces. Extra hearts are also available to extend your health bar and restarts are quick when you make mistakes.
If you’re stuck on one particular mech you can head to an arcade machine at basecamp – the Virtual Training Centre X2 – and replay any of your previous battles for cash. Each one was a rating of up to three stars depending on the speed with which you dispatch your foe. The bosses display a pleasing amount of variety despite the limited premise. ‘Innovative’ is perhaps too generous a word, but the encounters are surprising and satisfying to battle through. It’s far more forgiving than many games in the genre, instead adding challenge through its standard three-star rating system.
Graphically, it’s clean and colourful, if a little ordinary. The visual design of bosses is strong and communicates your objectives well, although when the camera zooms out finding your character on screen can be a challenge, especially after hitting a weak spot and being thrown from the mech. Gunman Clive’s pencil aesthetic gave that shooter a real sense of style that’s lacking here; it's pleasant, but the ‘competition’ is in a different league.
Once you’ve learned the patterns, taking the mechs down quickly becomes the name of the game. Mechstermination Force isn’t easy per se, but run-and-gun veterans should have no trouble. The game clock said we’d played just under five hours when we got to the final boss, and while there’s incentive to go back and improve your score using the better equipment you’ve unlocked, it’s the stature of the mechs and the scope of the gameplay that makes this 'bigger' than Hörberg’s previous games.
Two-player co-op fleshes out the package and the controls translate nicely to a single Joy-Con. The screen has to zoom out a fair way to accommodate both players and, again, it can be tough to track your mechsterminator, but it’s still solid and very enjoyable to take down the towering automatons with a friend.
Conclusion
With Cuphead just around the corner, we can’t help feeling sorry for Mechstermination Force. It's certainly less of a head-turner, but it's a more approachable take on boss rush platforming, with less of an emphasis on twitch-based, pixel-perfect precision. It's peppered with ingenious design and amusing writing and we thoroughly enjoyed our time with it. We'd recommend it as a more accessible alternative to (or appetiser for) Studio MDHR’s upcoming game. If you enjoyed Gunman Clive, this is a great expansion on the concept and well worth investigating.
Comments 53
Looks good and was hoping it reviewed well. It wasn't on my list of games to get in April but now it's become a game I want.
I think this looks great.
Gunman Clive 1 & 2 were amazing, so this guy has earned his keep with me. I'll gladly help him out again.
Reminds me a lot of Contra: Hard Corps, this'll be a good game to play while I wait for Cuphead.
Sounds perfect to me! As much as I wanted to like Cuphead I couldn’t justify the long term affects on my blood pressure.
I watched the trailer and this looks like loads of fun to play!
Don’t usually play boss rush games but Gunman Clive 1 and 2 were great so I’ll definitely pick this up.
@LegendOfPokemon Yeah, pretty much how I feel. Though I'm not in a rush to pick it up. I'll get to it eventually, and I'm sure I'll enjoy it when I do!
I know Gunman Clive is pretty popular but I really couldn't get into it so I'm a little weary of this getting praised as it might be the same sort of situation. Doesn't jump out at me as something I'd love.
Would expect nothing less from the guy who brought us Gunman Clive. After playing the snot out of Dynamite Headdy recently (another really good boss-rush style game on the Genesis) until being able to do it on one life recently, I'm in the mood for a new game of this type.
On a side note, I'm glad Horberg Productions decided to incorporate challenge through a ranking system as opposed to just making the main game brutally difficult as a lot of indie devs seem to be going for after the success of stuff like Celeste and of course Cuphead. Always refreshing to see a game like this come out that tries to strike a balance instead.
I've been planning on getting this one from the moment I saw it, glad to see it's as good as it sounds.
For only 5 hours worth of gameplay I may need to wait for a sale on this one which is a shame. I'm not really a completionist so I don't think there's much money's worth at £11!
I really enjoyed Gunman Clive 1 & 2 and this game gives me Contra: Hard Corps vibes so it's a must buy but I haven't decided yet when I'll get it. April is so full of games I want that I don't have time to play all of them. That said, this would be a quick game to play before the bigger games come out... Anyway, picking it up sooner or later.
I think £11 for 5 hours is fine - it's the quality of those hours that's important. I would go see a good movie at the cinema for - say - £8 and that's surely worse value for money?
For me time is limited, so being not to long is actually a plus. Games like Limbo, Inside and Gris are also short but very memorable and worth full price.
Already downloaded this one
They won my heart with Gunman Clive. I'm definitely getting this
Definite buy for me. Glad it turned out well.
@Starvald Yeah, I like games to be only as long as needed to convey whatever fun they have to share. I'd buy a two hour game if it was loaded with fun and compelling gameplay.
As many have said, the Gunman Clive games are so good I'll get this too. It sounds like a blast!
Looks good enough but I hate the concept of boss rush games.
@Scottwood101
I think £11 for a 5 hour game is fine value. Most of the greatest 2D platform games of all time were/are around 5 to 7 hours long and retailed for £40 (in fact, the old classics were a lot more expensive than that if you take inflation into account).
@Haywired
Let's be honest : noone completed SMW, DKC or any Mega Man game in less than 30 hours at the very least.
Not talking about a speedrun but about the first playthrough, which is our focus here.
A short game is fine if it's replayable, and this sounds like a lot of fun. I'm grabbing it for sure.
@Tibob
30+ hours to beat SMW or DKC...? That's RPG length. The average playtimes (not hardcore speedruns) to complete those games is nowhere near that. I think anyone who needs 30+ hours to complete just the main campaign for those games is doing something very wrong.
https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=9387
https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=2686
@dartmonkey I haven’t read your “Mechstermination Force” review yet — but wanted to compliment you (and/or the editors) on the Dalek / Doctor Who reference in the subtitle. Nice one; made me smile.
@Haywired I remember back in the 90s most people were working on completing DKC and SMW for months. Howlongtobeat and online gaming boards in general provide a very skewed perspective that isn't reflective of the general gaming public but only the hardcore gamers that actually bother to visit such sites.
@Haywired "...is doing something wrong"
Like dying ???
@sketchturner
Thanks, and may I add HLTB regarding old games is even less relevant as people replaying the game now and contributing know the game upside down.
@sketchturner Great point. As you might know, this is also known as selection bias, or self-selection bias in this case.
@RetroOutcast Dynamite Headdy is certainly unique and memorable. Did you play the (more difficult) Western version or the Japanese original? I can hardly get anywhere on the US version these days.
Also, I like your comment about offering grades vs. going for extreme difficulty. While I don’t mind high difficulty (to a point) in Rogue-lites, extreme difficulty in games with pre-defined levels can be discouraging to those of us who are... shall we say... “differently skilled.” Gating off content, and all that. With that said, I think I understand what the designers of Cuphead are going for. I never made much progress on the PC version, but will give it another try on Switch.
Oh yeah, I'll be running this with a friend soon enough. Can't wait. This AND Cuphead will be played.
Wait there was a Gunman Clive 2?! Never got around to finishing the first one but I liked it so I'm sold.
If I'm interpreting this right, the tagline is a nice nod to Doctor Who.
@sfb North American version. I did take the Japanese version for a spin recently via the recent Genesis collection and the difference is night and day as far as how punishing it is. Still, I'm more used to the NTSC version and that's what I had as a kid growing up so I enjoy it a little more. When I was like 7 or 8 I'd be able to get up to the Nasty Gatekeeper on a good day and sometimes Twin Freaks. It just feels odd to play what feels like a super-easy version of it after all these years.
I've always liked the idea of a ranking system. It was done well enough in Cuphead although I think having to do some of those RNG fests without taking a single hit is kind of stupid to get the S ranks. I think that's probably why I prefer Headdy over Cuphead if I'm honest. There are two bosses in the former with a considerable amount of RNG (Trouble Bruin as you're scaling the puppet tower and the final boss) and that's about it. With Cuphead, it plays a much larger role. Rumor Honeybottoms, that dragon and the shm'up stages were the worst offenders from what I experienced. That's not to say Cuphead is bad, but I genuinely believe that Headdy managed to do the concept a tad better 25 years ago.
@sfb Cuphead, to me, kind of takes the Super Meat Boy approach to dificulty. No lives or continues but the tradeoff is that you'll be dying a LOT more frequently/sooner than some of the classic games it takes inspiration from. I still really enjoyed the game but found myself getting annoyed with it far more than I did with Dynamite Headdy...even when I was a kid and experiencing the game for the first time and no doubt getting creamed by anything after the first boss a bunch.
@sketchturner I don't think HLTB is super inaccurate assuming the player is using external resources here and there when they're having issues progressing in retro games.
Back then, I'm sure it took longer for people to figure games out because all that was around were magazines and those didn't cover every game under the sun like the internet is capable of doing now. When I was in the 3rd grade, I sure as ****didn't beat Super Mario World 100% in 5 hours nor did I know about most of the secret routes until i screwed around enough to find them on my own.
(You used some not so lovely language - Matthew010)
@sketchturner @RetroOutcast
Just to clarify, in all my comments, I'm referring to the time taken to beat just the main game, not 100% completion (which obviously takes longer than 5-7 hours).
@sketchturner
Though speaking of Donkey Kong Country and HLTB, I recently played Donkey Kong Land on the Game Boy (for the first time. I'd never played it before). According to HLTB, the average time it takes to beat the game is around 2.5 to 3 hours, and that's pretty much exactly how long it took me.
Plus, to link that back to my initial point, Donkey Kong Land must've retailed for around £25 back in the mid-90s, which would obviously be a fair bit more in today's money, thus, I would say a 4 to 5 hour game for £11 in 2019 is comparatively good value (if we are to judge a game's value on its length, which I don't).
Will definitely be getting this, love Gunman Clive 1&2 . It is great to hear it is getting solid reviews.
I like colourful short action games at medium difficulty, I bought this straight away.
Did Cuphead get more mentions in the review than the actual game being reviewed?
I saw a video of Mechstermination Force a week or so ago, and thought it looked awesome. Glad it reviewed well too. It’ll soon be mine...
I think that I'd pick this over Cuphead.
Although Cuphead looks prettier, Mechsterminstion looks like more fun.
@MarinaKat Saw some other reviews mention they are all the same.
@sfb
"As you might know, this is also known as selection bias, or self-selection bias in this case." It's also known as "Using data to refute a ridiculous claim that both Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country take over 30 hours to beat."
@Haywired Fair enough, I respect empirical data — but I also think it’s fair to consider how the data was captured, and whether we can be confident that it is truly representative of a larger population.
This wouldn’t be a practical approach — but in theory, i think a more neutral data capture method would be to have a 3rd party compose a representative, randomly selected sample of players, have them play the game, and record and compile the results. Again, not realistic, unless someone commissions an academic study. In the absence of that, it’s difficult to say whether the data on that site is skewed towards more dedicated players. I suspect it might be, but I can’t prove it.
In fairness, I probably should admit my own bias. I tend to play through games very slowly. I’m not a completionist per se, but I tend to take lot of side quests and optional routes, go back soon after level completion to search for a few more collectibles, etc. And I often don’t even finish the main story. So my own (admittedly skewed) perception of game length is probably much longer than average. Plus, I nearly always game alone, so I don’t have the experiences of others to consider. So, I can’t claim to have any real authority on the topic of game completion length!
tl;dr - although I have some doubts about that particular dataset, it has some value & is more grounded than anything I have to offer - so I concede you have the better argument here.
Getting this game soon. Watched a video to see it in action and it just looks so much fun and Gunman Clive games were awesome too. More excited about this than Cuphead anyway but haven't played either.
Bought it this morning, played for about a half hour. Love how bare-bones this game is: just throws you right in. Visuals and music are very fine, but everything takes a backseat to the gameplay, which is fast, frantic and fun. Perfect for pick up n play, just as you'd expect from this dude. Great effort and well worth the full price.
I bought this game and it is awesome! I'd give it a, personally.
Btw, it's NOT easy. Saying it's more accessible than Cuphead is certainly accurate, but this game is still much harder than most games that release these days.
Played game last night - it is a quality game. The controls and gameplay are good. The game is HARD but FAIR. I grinded the tutorial boss for cash to buy health upgrades. Feels great when you finally beat a boss.
Nice review. I picked this up on your recommendation and have been enjoying it a lot
Having spent more time with the game and recently finished it, I'm of the opinion that Cuphead is the better game. Mechstermination Squad is bright and colorful, has a great soundtrack, and the giant bosses are a nice concept... but the game also suffers from slippery and often fiddly controls, unfair mechanics (such as bosses being immune to damage during certain attack phases), and telegraphing that comes way too late to be of any help at times. One of the biggest offenders is the trademark blue Cyclops mech (amusingly enough named after Mega Man X). Some of his attacks are simply unfair. For example, he has a ground punch that will automatically push you away if you're too close during the wind-up phase, and then the screen zooms out and shakes violently with each punch, making it really hard to keep track of your tiny character on-screen even on a big TV like mine. The same boss feels the need to send an electric current down it's body after you've spent a few seconds climbing it, which depending on where you are can unfairly hit you before you even know it's coming. While on top of the boss, he has another punch attack that is impossible to dodge if you're too far to the right due to bad telegraphing. Lastly, when his body breaks up, the yellow parts of his limbs often become immune to damage for basically no reason during certain animations. I witnessed this while using a weapon that fires steadily and rapidly, yet would stop damaging the boss parts sometimes. A lot of the fake difficulty is softened by the ability to buy health upgrades but compared to Cuphead, it's a less perfect experience. Cuphead has much better controls and aside from one boss, much more fair mechanics. Cuphead's bullet-jumping ability pretty much always works for example, while the magnet gloves that enable you to climb on this game sometimes don't work as intended. The shoulder buttons are odd as well, forcing you into a crouch but also locking you in place when shooting. To actually crouch and shoot forward, you have to hold the shoulder button rather than down, which takes getting used to. Play Contra 3 a bit then play this game and you'll know what I'm talking about.
Despite all of that, the game is still pretty fun and has a low price point too. Gunman Clive fans will probably get a real kick out of it and some of the mechs are pretty funny references to retro games. I certainly don't regret my purchase but If it came down to this and Cuphead, I'd get the latter.
Nice review and nice score. But 5 hours is pretty short. Still I might buy it someday when a proper discount drops. The game does look great.
@Henmii 5 hours?? Only if you are very good. If not it will take you maybe more than 20,30 hours!
@Whitestrider
I only said what the reviewer said. I have yet to play the game myself (its in my backlog).
@Henmii the reviewer is wrong then. Not the first time on this site, btw.
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