Game Pass Gambols 3: Mighty Goose. Run 'n Gun 'n Honk.

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022. Mighty Goose came out in 2021 but I wanted to play it so I'm including it anyway.

Game: Mighty Goose

Game Type: Run 'n Gun

Time Played: Approximately 4 hours.

Completion level: Rolled credits. Messed around with New Game+ but did not complete.

Approachability: High. It's very simple to control and not too difficult but has a bit of violence and some blood.

Should You Try It?: Do you like Metal Slug?

Mighty Goose is a Metal Slug ‘homage’ starring a well-armed goose as some kind of space bounty hunter. I think for about 80% of people that will be enough to know whether or not they will like the game and the rest of this entry will be superfluous. Nevertheless I will persevere.

Many games have taken their inspiration from Metal Slug but few have been quite as shameless. The cartoony visuals are nowhere near as detailed as those of the famed SNK run ‘n gun, but this is an indie effort and even back in the arcade heyday of the 90s those ultradetailed sprites and environments proved too costly to produce in the long run. Mighty Goose’s visuals are pleasant enough, evoking 32-bit 2D platformers with bright colors and lots of large sprites. If it weren’t HD and widescreen you could imagine this having a cult following on the Saturn. The soundtrack is peppy, upbeat, and jazzy. It doesn’t reach quite the heights that the best indie soundtracks do but it’s only one or two notches below them. You probably won’t seek out streaming versions of these tunes but they’re quite enjoyable within the context of the game. The gameplay is faster and more responsive than Metal Slug’s, especially after you unlock the loadout option that makes your goose go faster, and the game includes a dodge roll move and the ability to stay aloft after a jump by firing continually below yourself. Your standard arm cannon is pretty effective but you can pick up temporary upgrades including homing missiles, a machine gun, and a powerful shotgun and tesla gun, which are both great fun to use. A deep-voiced male announcer announces each time you pick one of these up, which is the only voice work in the game. You have limited ammo on the extra weapons but pick ups are relatively plentiful, giving the game some nice natural variation as you slightly change your tactics depending on what you’re armed with at any given moment. Enemy variety is adequate, ranging from standard troopers to small insects to enemies in vehicles such as bombers. There are a handful of bosses, which are enormous and challenging without being overly difficult or cheap. The final boss is especially satisfying to take down, without being unfair or breaking the difficulty curve.

I mentioned a loadout system earlier and it’s a slightly unusual one. You earn options as you complete levels and each of them has a certain energy cost associated with it. You have a limited energy budget so you have to pick and choose which of these you want active in your loadout for a given mission. You can’t change the loadout while on a mission but you do get to toggle things on and off before you embark. The upgrades themselves are fine but not exciting. You might increase your move speed (basically necessary) or increase the amount of ammo you get for your weapon pick ups or the amount of time you stay in your semi-invincible super mode lasts (this charges as you kill enemies and is activated by pressing both triggers.) You also get to select a companion character to travel with you and they do things like attack enemies or occasionally throw out a weapon powerup. Sometimes another companion will join you when you rescue them during a stage. You collect coins during gameplay, which you can spend through an in-game phone app for powerups…I think. It’s not tutorialized and I never used it. None of this stuff is particularly interesting but it doesn’t hurt the game either. There are also vehicles called warmachines you jump into that very much resemble the Metal Slugs from…Metal Slug. This adds some welcome variety and you get 4 extra hits before they blow up (you can also refill their health with a wrench icon) so they’re useful, though you can generally continue on foot if one gets destroyed. Your goose also has 4 hits, and can refill their health through medkits, which keeps the game from being too frustrating, though checkpoints are rather far apart so a death can set you back 2 or 3 minutes. It feels like a tough but fair nod to the genre’s arcade origins and you can retry as many times as you like. There’s also some behind the scenes ‘mercy’ programming that gives you extra weapons and health if you find yourself dying at the same checkpoint more than a couple times. The only penalty you take is to your stage grade, which is pretty harsh anyway. I got a D on stages where I only had one death, and also on stage 2 after I died almost ten times against the boss, so I don’t actually know how much it matters.

Mighty Goose isn’t perfect, of course. It puts a ton of explosion effects and screen shake on screen after you destroy certain enemies and I took lots of hits from enemy bullets I couldn’t see because the screen was bouncing around and there were seemingly dozens of pieces of scrap obscuring my view. It’s also not always clear when you can advance to the next area and I got hit trying to move forward because the screen didn’t scroll and instead a wave of enemies came at me. There are some instant kill hazards that don’t feel particularly fair because sometimes you have to blind jump down into a pit to continue and sometimes the pits are just bottomless death, and there are lava pools that might kill you even if you barely graze them. I got stuck in geometry a couple times and died to projectiles while I couldn’t move. These kinds of annoyances aren’t anywhere near enough to ruin the experience but are the kind of issues that small team projects sometimes have when they don’t have quite enough resources to fully polish the product.

Mighty Goose does have a story, I guess, but it’s incomprehensibly choppy. Characters appear with no introduction and give you assignments or fight you before disappearing. There are only a few lines of dialog per level so fortunately the developers didn’t make the mistake of stuffing the game with awful storytelling, and you don’t really need a narrative in a game like this so it’s fine for what it is. You’re a goose with an arm cannon, you shoot everything except the ally characters you can’t shoot and you move from left to right, occasionally using a vent to fly upwards or moving back to the right to hit a switch and open a door. A game with arcade roots doesn’t really need to be any deeper than that.

Mighty Goose is good, shallow, fun. There’s not a ton of content here, though it does offer New Game+ mode with remixed levels, as well as 2 player local co-op. The lack of limits on lives or continues means you can get through this in just a couple hours, which makes its $20 asking price a little steep for a game that’s decent but nothing special. I feel like $10 would be more appropriate for something like this, or maybe $15 if you really like the genre. On the other hand as a Game Pass game it’s pretty darn good. It’s very accessible, bright, colorful, and fun for a play through or two. It’s a great game to play in between huge open world behemoths or when you need a break from your latest hard as nails roguelite. It’s the kind of game that used to be called a good rental, a well-made title that just doesn’t have enough content or replay value to be worth its asking price, which back then was often at least $50. I always felt a little bad saying that about a game because this project was made by talented developers who made the game they wanted to make, made it well, and made a game that I enjoyed. I like Metal Slug! They also avoided artificially extending the length with arcade style cheapness or limited lives or continues and I appreciate that. Should they be penalized for working in a genre that’s expensive to produce on a level by level basis if it’s also a genre that many people like?

Game Pass offers one potential model for how to monetize arcade style games at a time when actual arcades are all but dead. Apple Arcade, of course, is doing a similar thing on cell phones. Of course there are far too many games coming out these days for even Microsoft or Apple to want to put them all on their service, at least at a price that’s fair to developers. But for those that do get selected this is a great way for players to enjoy these kinds of short games without feeling like they spent too much while the developers get paid for their work, though based on the credits this game was also supported through Patreon, presumably by people who really love Metal Slug. I hope they were happy with the product they ended up getting. I suspect they were.

GAME PASS GAMBOLS RATING (out of 5):

Game Pass Gambols 1: The Pedestrian

Game Pass Gambols 2: Olija