MULLET!!!
Mullet Mad Jack is a first person shooter styled to 90s English-dubbed anime. You are a contestant on a murder cyberpunk game show trying to win a pair of shoes (and save a princess) by killing countless robots in armed combat. And as part of the game, audience approval is hooked up to your bloodstream and you need a shot of dopamine every 10 seconds, which you get by killing robots, or else you die. When you get hurt, it also takes away from your timer rather than a health bar.
The story mode is structured somewhere between a roguelite and a Hotline Miami. You have to run, jump, wallrun, and slide through 10 oneish-minute-long floors in a row (climbing a tower), collecting upgrades along the way. If you die, you have to restart the set of 10 levels and you lose all your upgrades. If you beat the set of floors and the boss at the end (I think the bosses are checkpointed), you move on to the next set of 10 and see a little more story.
For my money, I loved Mullet Mad Jack but I think it's going to be polarizing. It looks and sounds unbelievable, capturing the old anime look and sound pretty much perfectly. It also carries a satisfying ultraviolence in its presentation and feel (there's the Hotline Miami), paired lovingly with some very funny consumerist satire.
The sticking point for many is going to be the structure of running through levels and murdering dudes, because the game doesn't change very much (outside of a steady difficulty increase) over its 3-4 hour runtime. The gunplay feels great and the audiovisual experience is immensely satisfying, but the combat is about as deep as a puddle and you can die in some unfair-feeling ways until you learn how to sift through all the game throws at you.
Still, I really loved pretty much all of what MMJ was doing. If you love Suda 51 games and particularly No More Heroes 3, drop everything and grab this immediately. This is your game.
P.S. Great on Steam Deck!
Mullet Mad Jack is a first person shooter styled to 90s English-dubbed anime. You are a contestant on a murder cyberpunk game show trying to win a pair of shoes (and save a princess) by killing countless robots in armed combat. And as part of the game, audience approval is hooked up to your bloodstream and you need a shot of dopamine every 10 seconds, which you get by killing robots, or else you die. When you get hurt, it also takes away from your timer rather than a health bar.
The story mode is structured somewhere between a roguelite and a Hotline Miami. You have to run, jump, wallrun, and slide through 10 oneish-minute-long floors in a row (climbing a tower), collecting upgrades along the way. If you die, you have to restart the set of 10 levels and you lose all your upgrades. If you beat the set of floors and the boss at the end (I think the bosses are checkpointed), you move on to the next set of 10 and see a little more story.
For my money, I loved Mullet Mad Jack but I think it's going to be polarizing. It looks and sounds unbelievable, capturing the old anime look and sound pretty much perfectly. It also carries a satisfying ultraviolence in its presentation and feel (there's the Hotline Miami), paired lovingly with some very funny consumerist satire.
The sticking point for many is going to be the structure of running through levels and murdering dudes, because the game doesn't change very much (outside of a steady difficulty increase) over its 3-4 hour runtime. The gunplay feels great and the audiovisual experience is immensely satisfying, but the combat is about as deep as a puddle and you can die in some unfair-feeling ways until you learn how to sift through all the game throws at you.
Still, I really loved pretty much all of what MMJ was doing. If you love Suda 51 games and particularly No More Heroes 3, drop everything and grab this immediately. This is your game.
P.S. Great on Steam Deck!