Indie Game of the Week 447: Mullet MadJack

I swear, this habit of finding intriguing Indie games on Game Pass and then discovering that they're yet another run-based thing is starting to wear me down a sukoshi. I realize that's just how the Indie scene is right now, while still gratefully also being vast enough to provide plenty of alternatives, but I'm ready for a different fad to strike (3D collectathon platformers? Please?). Well, there's no arguing with the results: I suspect Hades II, Megabonk, and Ball x Pit will make plenty of Top Ten lists this year (and I even liked the last of those, so there goes my credibility). Last year's Mullet MadJack could be reductively boiled down an endless runner crossed with a '90s boomer shooter, with plenty of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon neon-tinged hyper-masculine anime parody tropes layered on top to produce an overstimulating exercise in frantic badassery and for the most part I'm into it. Where it falls down a little for me is insisting on a very strict time limit and constantly bumping you back to the last multiple of ten in its multi-story assault on a skyscraper filled with "robillionaires"; combining our distaste for homicidal androids with our equal scorn for the 1%.

But let's backtrack a little. Mullet MadJack is set in a future where AI has not only surpassed human intelligence but become the main consumer class, with humans effectively relegated to Running Man-esque fodder for online streaming bloodsports. Jack, the titular mulleted maniac, is a "moderator" that fights evil androids but is only given ten seconds to live—it runs off a similar set of rules as the Crank movies where you have to constantly keep your audience amused or else risk having your life support cut off. Kills give you extra seconds on the clock and stylish ones even more so; through headshots, explosions, environmental kills, and gruesome melee finishers you can keep your heart ticking long enough to reach the exit to the next floor, found by proceeding forwards in a mostly linear path filled with enemies and hazards, and procure another upgrade before getting off the elevator and resuming the cycle. Upgrades might include new weapons—there's at least five or six types with different stat distributions, including katanas that can be thrown like boomerangs—or passives like extra time on the clock, bonus time for certain types of kill (including nutshots, which makes me wonder why this game didn't make Dan's list last year), or the option to have Jack quip more (or less) frequently in his knowingly stupid Duke Nukem voice. Since ten seconds isn't a whole lot of time and getting shot reduces that stock even faster, you're compelled to quickly move, shoot, and kick (which destroys drones and gets you free soda from the vending machines) through each floor without really stopping to look around or procure supplies. After all, with infinite ammo and a health system intrinsically linked to how rad you're being, time is really the only precious commodity you need to worry about. That, and melee weapons with which to kill enemies for a full timer refill.

The anime stylings of the game, which aren't particularly anime reminiscent barring the annoying codec lady "Streamer" who yells motivational epithets at you between each floor, are part and parcel of the whole rapid-paced, over-stimulated vibe of the gameplay loop and in that context is a pretty engaging combination of silliness and coolness that often represents the shounen genre at its best. It even has an unboxing mode on the main menu where you where you open up a gigantic hypothetical PC-98 case for the game and sort through all its feelies, including a code wheel right out of the LucasFilm oeuvre, so it's evident that historical attention to detail was important to the developers. Despite the preponderance of optical media, however, most of the future appears to run on VHS: your chapter select screen has one per episode and the telltale visual and audio glitches produced by a warped tape are present throughout. Fully leaning into its "git gud" mentality to befit its macho goofiness, the game offers multiple difficulty and gameplay modes with the hardest variants each granting you a unique pair of advertisement-festooned sneakers that provide little more than bragging rights. These difficulty modes are broken up into seven types overall—the hardest reducing your bonus time for normal kills to zero, requiring each death to be a spectacle—and you better believe it'll offer to reduce that difficulty setting for you if you die too frequently, which you of course will until you get a good wind behind your sails. The way the upgrade system works means that the further you progress the more likely your survival: with a handful of upgrades it becomes that much easier to push through and the individual floors don't really get any harder until you reach the next set of ten, which will introduce new enemy and hazard types, so it's the kind of run-based affair where momentum is everything. Dying a few times on the very first floor of a set might seem discouraging given you have to survive ten (and a boss fight!) to hit the next save checkpoint but it's far more likely you'll fail early on than, say, the fifth floor or the eighth floor because by then you'll have a better weapon and several useful passives to support you.

For the most part I'm into what Mullet MadJack has going on and it's obviously something that wouldn't work without the run-based aspect given how it's all set up, and it's not like we're spoiling for choice in retro FPS games making the rounds these days if being cautious and not having your progress constantly wiped is more your speed, but I still find myself enervated by how imprecise and irksome it can be. There have been numerous times where I killed something for the boost just as my time ran out, seeing the little "+3 secs" notice pop up at the same time as the game over chyron, or how I'll occasionally blast at something with my double-barrel shotty only to miss from a few feet away. I'll run right up to the 2D sprites of, well, Sprite soda (I don't think it's actually Sprite but close enough) but apparently not be close enough to drink it in order to save myself, leading to a demise that didn't seem all that fair or warranted. Likewise to the 2D weapons that adorn the walls that you can grab for a Resident Evil-style desperation melee move; since you can't exactly stop and backtrack for missing items given the amount of time on your hands, that deadly knife or wrench or manga tankoubon is likely gone forever. It's irritating after a while to keep hitting these failstates despite earning what was a clutch recovery by all appearances. The busy levels also require a bit of loading time, which is just enough to disrupt the speed-of-sound flow of the game even on an SSD. Presentationally, though, I can't really argue that it doesn't accomplish what it sets out to do.

So that's Mullet MadJack, a very ludicrous but exhilarating game that I've now added to my "one session per day" list of run-based stuff I've downloaded off Game Pass (which I am not paying for but am getting legitimately, both you fans of boycotts and Microsoft's legal team should respectively be happy to learn) along with Blue Prince and Ball x Pit, all the while left wondering what it is about this particular three-steps-forward-two-steps-back format—that so acutely makes gaming feel like the time vampire hobby that it is—that has fully enraptured developers of a certain budgetary tier. I guess because it stretches two hours of content into twenty? Economical, I'll give it that.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Video Time!

Once again, I have a clip of this game in action since screenshots don't really do it justice. Pretty miserable progress but then that's 90% of runs in my experience (I'm playing on the Challenging difficulty setting for the record, which is "developer intended"):

See all the little time bonuses I got at the end there that amounted to nothing? Fun. That said, I really need to do something about my chronic reloading problem...