Super Meat Boy 3D Review - IGN

Meat the third dimension

The original Super Meat Boy was built all around speed and precision; regularly demanding players make unbelievable jumps at high velocity, land on a box the size of Meat Boy himself, jump again while maintaining momentum, all while avoiding saw blades, insta-death salt waterfalls, and all forms of other hazards along the way. That’s hard enough to do in 2D, so the idea of requiring that level of precision while also contending with a Z-Axis made the thought of a 3D Super Meat Boy seem like an unsolvable puzzle.

I’ll say straight up that even though the attempt is respectable, Super Meat Boy 3D does not completely solve this problem. Far too many of my deaths came from frustratingly jumping straight towards a wall or platform, only to find out that I was actually slightly behind or slightly in front of it, causing poor Meat Boy to jump towards nothing and turn into super meat paste. Fortunately, levels are so short and respawns are so quick that deaths are just a slight inconvenience, and much of that frustration is forgivable when you consider how well developers Sluggerfly and Team Meat have managed to preserve the spirit and unique feel of Meat Boy, resulting in an uneven, but nevertheless entertaining follow-up to an all-time classic.

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If you’re unfamiliar with the 2010 Xbox Live Arcade original, Super Meat Boy was a 2D platformer about a cube of meat, chasing after an evil fetus in a suit and top hat, trying to save his girlfriend, who happens to be a cube of bandages. Levels were lightning quick, often lasting no more than 30-45 seconds, enabling the level design to focus on extremely difficult and hyper-precise platforming that you were expected to die over and over again to.

The easiest way to describe Super Meat Boy 3D then, is to simply point at the title. This is the same Super Meat Boy, but as a 3D precision platformer instead of a 2D one. The story of Meat Boy chasing Dr. Fetus is the same, there are once again five worlds, each world is capped off with a boss battle that mostly just requires you to dodge three phases of increasingly difficult hazards, there are Dark World versions of every level unlocked by getting A+ ranks on the Light World versions, and unlockable guest characters from a variety of other indie games gained by finding hidden bandages within a level.

It’s a formula that works to great effect once again, providing players of different skill levels with a layered set of goals with satisfying rewards that all serve to expand what would otherwise be a relatively short run time. The base goal of beating all of the light world levels took me about 4 hours, then I spent another four hours getting A+ ranks on all of those levels to unlock the Dark World levels, and now I’m in the middle of a Dark World playthrough, and after that I could look towards finding all of the bandages and unlocking all of the characters, which is a daunting task since not only do you have to find the hidden bandage in a level, but you also have to clear it without dying with the bandage in tow. So while the base game is fairly short, getting everything Super Meat Boy 3D has to offer will take quite a bit of time, and the completionist route has some tantalizing rewards in the form of more levels and characters that each approach levels in a different way.

On the gameplay side of things, Super Meat Boy 3D does a great job of translating the feel and movement of Meat Boy into the third dimension. He’s super fast, stops on a dime, can either leap 50 yards ahead with a full press and hold of the jump button, or do the shortest of short hops with just a light tap of it, conveniently giving him just enough height to jump over a saw blade. The level design, especially in the harder stages demands a lot from the player, and fortunately the controls are tight enough to enable you to meet those demands.