Monday, November 16, 2015

Dramatic Cake Eating #56: Muffin Knight

With some games, you spend months pouring over screenshots, absorbing every trailer, and reading every preview article while you decide if it's the right game for you.

And with others, you're sold with little more than a name. Muffin Knight is one of those games.












Muffin Knight is a game about collecting muffins. Though you really spend very little time as a knight, so the name is only partly appropriate. It is comprised of small multi-tiered arena style levels, with infinitely spawning enemies and muffins. Run around and get the muffins until you die. That's it. That's Muffin Knight.


BUT WAIT! There's more!

There's always more.

The story starts with an old lady shitting behind a bush. If that doesn't tell you that you want to play this game, I don't know what more I can tell you.


"Excuse me sonny, just making some Early Access games back here."
A lad is walking through the woods and finds a bowl of fresh muffins. He goes to eat them, because who wouldn't get down on some free muffins? When he touches them, they explode all over the place. The old lady plops out from behind the bush and takes umbrage with this. She then curses him....to be a knight.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO---

Wait.

Wait this is pretty sweet.
He is tasked with venturing all over the world collecting all of the muffins in order to return to his former self. It seems to me that just taking the armor off would be an easier gig, but hey, that's me.

You travel from stage to stage collecting a certain number of muffins before unlocking the next level. Every time you collect a muffin, you change classes. There's 18 different characters in the game, all with different abilities and proficiencies.


But not all Muffin Knight classes are created equally.

It seems the developers started out with some generally interesting ideas. A cat that's also a ninja. Ninja Cat. Cool. Next. A unicorn that drops explosive rainbow shits. That's....yeah. Yeah! A junk-food vomiting zombie? Sure, why not! And then, at some point, when the drugs wore off or whatever, they thought up such instant classics as 'bird' and 'frog'. Not "frog that's also a divorced used car salesman". A frog and nothing else.

Unless "Frog that looks like Sam the Eagle" is somehow a clever character trait.

And the classes vary wildly in usefulness. Of the 18 characters, about 3 are of any real use. And they are selected randomly every time you get a muffin, so you spend the majority of the time fighting against whatever shitty character you have. It can be a real bummer when you're on a hot muffin streak and you get the fucking monkey, which more often than not will only lead to your own death. The Monkey and the Pumpking (the Gobots version of  Jack Skellington) shoot projectiles that fly horizontally across the screen or down any platforms it touches, respectively. They'll kill some of the enemies they touch, which is the only redeeming thing about these characters. If they hit you, and they will, your character is stunned. And in this game enemies are spawning constantly and endlessly, so any second you're not actively avoiding them is a second you're already dead. If you're playing with another player, it's inevitable you'll be killed again and again by innocently thrown bananas.

"I know it was you, Monkey. You broke my heart."
The characters can level up and power up their attacks, but this really only makes the more OP characters more OP and the shitty characters slightly less shitty.

Perks can also be unlocked and equipped to help your quest for baked goods. Things like the ability to double jump or slow down time. If one of those sounds more helpful to you, congratulations, you are a Muffin Knight master now.

For real this time.






3 comments:

  1. Too bad the muffins weren't flavoured.

    That Santa level sucked.

    Also the achievements were glitched.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. All great points that should have made it into the review.

      Delete