Was it Good? - MDK

the Earth is being invaded by giant destructive Grunts and aggressive alien race they have landed their city-sized mine Crawlers on the surface and are driving around harvesting all the planet's resources so their leader Gunter glut can eat them our only hope is Kurt hectic a space station janitor supported by his friend Max a genetically engineered six-armed dog and a mad scientist Kurt must fight through six giant mine crawler Mega machines Traverse absurdist puzzles and take out the pilot of each one before finally traveling to the alien Homeworld and taking down Gunter MDK is a fast surreal intense single-player game fondly remembered as a cult classic but was it actually any good well I've gone back and replayed every level killed every grunt and shot every special missile from their head mounted sniper rifle even found the secret cow level based on Earthworm Jim so let's find out welcome I'm Josh Strife Hayes and today we'll be replaying the 1997 third person action shooter MDK as usual a massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon twitch and YouTube who keep the channel alive more information on how you can support at the end for now let's begin MDK was an action shooter made by shiny entertainment first released on PC in May of 1997 then later the same year on the PlayStation 1. for this review I'll be playing the PlayStation 1 version because they're similar and it is considered to have the superior control scheme both the original MDK and its SQL mdk2 are available on both Steam and good old games although being such an old game the release does have all the usual issues struggling to run on Modern Hardware and missing a few of the original cutscenes although the good old games version does seem to be the better of the two now shiny entertainment had made a few games before most notably both earthworm gym games side scrolling absurdist games which actually spawned the TV show earthworm gym and as a company they went on to produce Messiah another cult classic where you play as a baby angel sent by God to reclaim a world and can infest people's minds there's an excellent retrospective review on this game by accursed Farms over on his game dungeon Channel I'll link it below so shiny entertainment makes strange games and The Man Behind the strangeness of Earthworm Jim was Nick bruty now previously Nick had worked on Disney's The Jungle Book for the NES Aladdin for the Genesis and Captain Planet for the ZX Spectrum all very family-friendly straight laced normal games but with the success of Earthworm Jim and wanting to artistically rebel against a career of rather understandable games Nick sat down and designed MDK now Nick himself describes it as a reaction or Outburst from having worked back to back on cartoon games such as Aladdin Jungle Book and Earthworm Jim don't get me wrong I loved working on those games and learning new Styles but my heart is in fantasy and science fiction I knew straight away this was what I wanted to do next Nick would go on to create planet Moon Studios and release the PC and Xbox shooter armed and dangerous a satirical game heavily inspired by the service nature of MDK so what is the plot and what does MDK stand for well let's try and unravel the plot first and this is the start of our eclectic maddening Journey Dr fluke Hawkins believes he has discovered an anomaly in space called flange orbits however No One Believes him so he builds a space station to go and investigate himself and he calls the space station the gym Dandy now the origins of the phrase and the name Jim Dandy go back to the mid-1800s but for a more sci-fi or fantasy based connection it may relate to Jim Dandy mangram an American rock singer frontman of the band Black Oak Arkansas known for the classic 80s fantasy and sci-fi Vibes and in 1974 Jim Dandy featured as an artist on the experimental compilation album flash Fearless versus The zorg Women Part 5 and 6 alongside other Rock Legends such as Alice Cooper and this album has the same Silver age sci-fi aesthetic that MDK hints at with the Jim Dandy space station finished Dr Hawkins bribes his on-ground janitor cut hectic to join him he does this through the use of Kurt's favorite dish Hungarian gulash after a week in space Dr Hawkins realizes he is wrong and flange orbits do not exist however he refuses to return to Earth so instead builds a genetically engineered robotic dog called Bones and when bones is complete the dog asks to be called Max instead Max is meant to help Dr Hawkins run the station but instead spends his time tending his vegetable garden if it sounds like I'm making all this up you can read The Game's manual which contains extracts from Dr Hawkins Journal which details all of the events on board the gym Dandy after a year of nothing Dr Hawkins Pilots the gym dandy back to Earth but notices some strange energy streams flowing toward the planet transport tunnels of some kind and out of them fall massive alien mine crawlers city-sized harvesting machines designed to collect all of a planet's natural resources the Alien Invaders become known as the stream Riders they overwhelm the planet defeating every combined military of every country and so as a Last Hope janitor Kurt hectic puts on the advanced coil suit grabs his sniper helmet which can detach from his face and become an arm mounted minigun and dives from low orbit of the gym Dandy down onto the mine crawlers to kill the pilot of each one and save the planet but before we jump into analyzing the gameplay one more question what does MDK stand for there are many theories in the manual the operation against the Stream Rider mine crawlers is nicknamed Mission deliver kindness so it could be that but it could also be the main character's initials Max doctor and cut or as the developers said themselves it could stand for whatever you want it to stand for at the time of asking they consider that it meant Mother's Day kisses but in 2011 on the good old games comment for the actual game Nick bruty himself finally answered the question MDK is a reference or at least a temporary reference to the 1993 Sci-Fi Action film Demolition Man starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes in the film a criminal and police are frozen for hundreds of years and then released into an advanced society which has forgotten the reality of crime and so the bad guy Simon Phoenix played by Snipes is called in as committing a code 187 a code so old the police don't even know its meaning so they check it on the computer and code 187 means murder death kill or MDK the reason the full title of murder death kill is never actually used is because the game did have a line of tie-in toys planned and the developers thought toy companies would be unwilling to put murder death kill on video game toys aimed at a younger audience and they were probably right so with the eclectic plot and name play literally MDK only has six levels eight were planned but the final two run out of development time each level can be finished in about 30 minutes despite the fact they're expansive 20 if you play very quickly and each level starts in the same way with you diving from the gym Dandy onto the Mind crawler below each level has a short narrative fluff about where in the world you actually are but these are mostly irrelevant as it's the structure of the Crawlers you'll be playing on not the country the skydiving sections have you avoiding a green sweeping radar coming from the mine crawler and dodging incoming missiles and if you're skilled you can actually grab several power-ups dropped for you these are hanging from ribbon parachutes we'll look at the power-ups later so after diving in you land on the level controls are pretty simple run forward and backward d-pad turns tank controls L1 and R1 strafe X jumps and holding X midair activates your Ribbon parachute which slows your descent each level in MDK is broadly divided into two types of gameplay known as Arenas and corridors an arena is usually a large open space with a simple puzzle and some enemies to fight a platforming bit or an item to find which opens a door the gameplay of MDK is hosted in the arena sections and Arenas are joined together by corridors which are long enclosed sections used to hide loading screens and very rarely feature enemies and that's pretty much it every level follows the same formula skydive in from the space station move from Arena to Arena via the corridors defeat the pilot of the mindcrawler by shooting them a lot with either regular guns or your sniper and then end in the energy beam so what's the arena gameplay actually like first off it's fast Curt moves extremely quickly and the devs made sure that MDK runs at a smooth 30 frames a second even on Playstation 1 which for the scale of the levels and the amount of enemies and projectiles shown is impressive speed wise it comes close to a third person Doom so let's look at the third person sections specifically holding Square shoots and your weapon is a face mounted rifle which detaches and joins your arm and while you're in third person view it becomes the arm minigun you have unlimited bullets and shooting an enemy brings the enemy's health bar here and you can shoot while moving and jumping and indeed you should because standing still often means death but along with your basic gun you have an arsenal of upgrades if you find the super machine gun upgrade the next several hundred bullets you shoot will be way more powerful but if you pick this upgrade up you cannot turn it off you have to use it for the next few bullets you shoot all of the other items are used with the circle button your basic grenades do way more damage however throwing a grenade while on the floor locks you into a standing still throw animation which is dangerous so you should jump and then throw a grenade while you're in the air which does not stop you moving you've got the inflatable dummy which distracts all the enemies on the gun turrets letting you run past and safely take them out and then the world's smallest nuclear bomb which has a tiny mushroom cloud and is used to open nuclear locked doors you've also got the thumper which is a giant hammer that slaps left and right and hurts everything on the floor and you must jump before the damaged shock waves come out and this is very much the game's sense of humor absurdist and weird while in an arena enemies will constantly spawn for generators so always blow these up first and some Arenas won't let you leave until everything is destroyed now while playing you'll notice that the model of Kurt is animated differently to the rest of the game Kurt is a 2d Sprite animated relatively smoothly almost appearing rotoscoped which is where a real model is animated over and the pixel textured armor gives a much softer feel the edges feel smoother yet the world and the enemies are made of chunky Jagged Edge polygons giving a harsh sharp defined feel if this was a stylistic choice it serves really nicely to separate Kurt from the enemies and the mine crawler itself enhancing that alien feeling Kurt feels soft and human and the enemies feel angular and alien the combat is relatively smooth with lovely sprays of pixel Showers of blood from enemies and brightly colored energy projectiles and the endless shower of ejected shells from Kurt's arm mounted minigun streaming away from the model but the platforming does have some rough edges the sheer speed of MDK makes decision jumping challenging not impossible just not focused on and the size of the levels means you're meant to appreciate the scale not the minutia this means when you get close to an edge and inspect it individual elements of the level design can sometimes seem lackluster flaws are often extremely flat corridors can have gaps where the walls joins together it feels thin stitched together almost as if the level assets needed to be stretched thinner to make the level itself bigger MDK is meant to be played quickly and when you slow down it loses that blinding speed which was being used to cover some of the cracks it's extremely easy to fall through a wall or clip through a gate and you never quite know where the hitbox is for Kurt or the floor or the ledge you're jumping to that's not saying that jumping stepped up platforms at speed isn't fun it is but if you miss a jump you quickly realize the controls are not tight enough to let you save it MDK wouldn't succeed as a platformer alone now a fast-paced third-person shooting game with decent platforming sounds fun but what really sets MDK apart is the sniping mechanic you can attach your gun arm back onto your helmet pressing select brings up sniper mode and this is first person and in an absolutely amazing Testament to the scale of the game you can zoom in up to 100 times magnification and the shots are still accurate while sniping you can also cycle through different types of ammo regular bullets never run out but then you've got homing bullets sniper grenades homing sniper grenades arcing mortars and the secret hidden bones airstrike whenever you fire a shot in Sniper mode one of the three circular screens to the top will track your bullet effectively giving you bullet cams but why do you need these well this puzzle needs you to snipe some enemies on a far away Tower they hold up signs to taunt you and the hit detection is absolutely fantastic now shooting from this far away is fine but what really enhances this system is the delayed explosion mortar shell which arcs through the air like with this puzzle enemies mock you from behind glass and then above them there are four crooked chimneys leading to the enemy room this means to defeat them and pass this puzzle you must lob four mortars one into each tunnel now aiming a mortar is tough but using the bullet cam you can track how close you were to hitting the shot so you've got a fast paced manic movement third person shooter combined with a slow methodical Act accurate first person sniper and it's the combination of these two things which make MDK interesting and lets you approach most levels in two ways you can run in all guns blazing and try and Dodge the enemies this was my preferred approach or you can stay back and snipe the spawn points and gun Towers from the other side of the Arena that works too and the fact the entire arena is loaded in and the hundred times Zoom is useful is amazing so let's play level one use the world's smallest nuke to open the door run through some tunnels and reach the sniper practice area get a grenade and use it to destroy the scenery and then a mortar training bit and note how the enemies are mocking you through the glass turning this from a boring mechanical tutorial into a more narrative Revenge Mission these things are mocking you personally destroy them take on a big tank in the open area and realize the enemy projectiles always shoot where you were not where you will be they do not lead their shots which makes dodging a lot easier also notice a really cool touch here when you turn while running the camera leans like a racing bike the sky box even leans slightly with it but the actual level geometry the flap that you're running on remains static in relation which really enhances the feeling of speed the camera tilting means that you're moving so fast you can't help but tilt your head it's a small but very nice touch in most Arenas you'll not only be rushed by ground troops but also waves of flying gun ships now just like Doom you don't need to aim up you'll just automatically lock onto any enemy in the general direction you're facing within the vertical line and small aircraft appear often but blow up quickly you'll often destroy them before they do any damage to you so their purpose is to keep the Action Moving and keep the enemy seen as a constant threat not actually kill you blow up an even bigger door then jump down into this hole now with the relatively low camera angle and the expansive size of the Arenas it can sometimes be difficult to see smaller drops or tunnels especially when the colors all blend together the inside Arena sections are lovely great use of levels and cover design lovely touch to put the spawners at the end of small Corridor so you have to explore all and then when we're outside again a new mechanic we're told to capture an enemy bombing ship so when one lands we jump into it and now we do a bombing run this mechanic is used twice throughout the game and honestly is incredibly lackluster the first use here is extremely simple you have recharging bombs which can be dropped within this Square by moving the aimer they'll hurt enemies and blow up buildings now the flight path of the actual vehicle is on Rails so you can't control it you can only leave the ship when you land so it's an interesting distraction once but it's not really a substantial mechanic you can complete the game without doing this the second time this is used however is awful we'll get to that soon open the nuke door and throw some mortars into some tubes take up these tanks across a gap and then fail to make this jump now thankfully you're meant to fail here so you just fall into a shooting gallery now one thing MDK does very well to imply vast scale is keep the enclosed areas almost entirely dark there are many parts of MDK where there are no wall textures or reflection Graphics just Blackness and this keeps the Mind crawler alien and means that the small piercing beams of light the player does see are used as guidance markers in MDK if you can see it it usually means go here whether it's a towering structure in the distance or a single ray of light every level is purely linear but the use of color and light to highlight small drops or doors is quite nice there's very little visual clutter in terms of guidance at least until the mirror level this gets us into the red jumping room glass panels lining a cylinder room with red laser edging but first drop down into the massive Spike pit and blow up the button cover itself a giant painted Target MDK has no time for subtlety this opens up the vent and the updraft this means your Ribbon shoot will now lift you up and allow you to Glide speed jump around the edge of the room get the top cross beams and grab a few weapon power-ups as we go and then the elite room now I love how you can see these enemies through the small Windows let's you glance the big guys before running in and if you run in you'll die because these Elite enemies cannot be hurt by your normal gun thankfully there is a solution there's a malfunctioning Droid just around the corner and if you shoot it you can then climb inside now this thing looks like a cross between a Dalek and Batman and this is the only time in the game you have to do this drive the small Sentry bot through the Hall of Elites and when you reach the end you'll find the world's most interesting bomb which you throw and then the enemies gather around it because it is interesting and then it blows up killing them all zany indeed it's a shame that stealth was never used again because that's quite an interesting mechanic and this gets us to the boss the Mind crawler Pilots of the first level they are secure in that Tower in the distance and this means switching from third person to sniper and taking some pot shots and if you hit them they will cower but you can just about see the tip of their arm on the side and still do damage even while they're hiding now while you're shooting they will fire back at you and while in Sniper view you can still sidestep with L1 and R1 so you can dodge but then drop ships will also deliver enemy grunts onto your little platform along with a few cluster bombs you have to run away from so you'll be switching from sniper to third person often however if you're accurate you can snipe the cluster bomb from the drop ships and blow them up before they reach the platform and when the boss dies the mine crawler blows up and gets dragged back into the energy stream from which it came where it was originally dropped off on the planet unfortunately Kurt gets dragged in as well and every level ends in the same way you are now chasing a health power up through the energy beam you have to move around so you don't touch the edges because if you do you'll take damage and if you eventually do grab the power up Max will then fly in Tethered to the space station and drag you back out if he didn't do this you would be dragged all the way to the stream Rider's home planet after each level you're given a debrief of your progress now interestingly each level has a hidden time limit and I actually failed to save the city now failure doesn't mean anything mechanical the game just says oh well you still don't get anything secret for finishing level within the time limit but oddly the first level is the only one I struggled with the other five levels have much more leeway you also get shown some stats such as your accuracy and number of headshots and then you are off again next mine crawler parachute in as usual land and now we arrive on a battle crawler complete with test firing range and we need to run past these shells and Dodge them but funny little detail if you fall into the center of this gun range you can watch the targets pop up the ones that the stream Riders are shooting at they're actually realistic pictures of people a businessman a woman in a bikini I wonder who these models actually are Glide up into the next Arena and lobber mortar throw a hole in the glass Shield to access another nuke and now I'm realizing that throw a mortar through a specific place is indeed a fun mechanic but it's only ever used one dimensionally there's never any need for timing or connection to a greater puzzle everything in MDK is extremely self-contained one room never mechanically affects the next the experience of playing MDK though isn't just about shooting aliens or solving puzzles it's about appreciating and smiling at the absurdity of this Alien Invasion attempt like these tiny grunts carrying around massive artillery shells and when you shoot them they drop them and blow themselves up MDK is a game which takes its absurdity very seriously and this extremely self-aware design enhances the general Ambience yes you're saving the Earth from undeniable danger but the danger itself on a moment-to-moment level is very stupid this level actually Loops back around to the original firing range but now we're on the other side of the canyon where the guns are now interestingly while this technically is the same Arena from earlier this isn't actually the exact same Arena from earlier and if you did manage to make the jump in the previous room which you shouldn't be able to you wouldn't Reach This bit level wise it's the same but it's actually two identical runes so we stand on the gun because there's a power up here and then the game seems to lag a bit and suddenly I'm thrown into the air fall into Blackness and now I'm falling down the outside of the mine crawler's command Tower and land in this extremely long outside firing range platforming bit I don't know how the connections from map to map work or how the alien nature of the Mind crawler is laid out but it's best not to question it because if you start trying to work out what MDK is you'll go mad what you will start to notice about this outside section is the reflective nature of the platforms and walls the texture is a mirror and this becomes a graphical Marvel pretty soon the outside section is a long platforming challenge to reach a gun line at the end dodging smaller enemies and massive projectiles and when you reach the ramp the next area is a platform of smashed mirrors in a giant Circle above the floor you've got an elite red grunt chasing you and then Boulders spawn in and also chase you and while you jump from Shard to Shard a central pendulum swings around tries to knock you off this is the kind of design you'd end up with if you had a level design meeting told everyone to add an idea and then went with every single one of them you can feel that the whole game is definitely an artistic pushback to the years of caked on normality it's overwhelming it's stacking mechanics on mechanics it's visually glorious and ultimately because the whole game is designed as a pushback to the artistic Norm it's just oozing passion you just know that MDK was made with a love for gaming because there's no other way it could have been made Modern games are often made by the higher up Executives agreeing on the safest way to do something MDK was definitely designed by people who love video games saying this is insane and I want to do it this gets us to the mirror Labyrinth a huge room of flat reflective surfaces and I imagine at the time this was a feat of graphical processing power unfortunately it does have the side effect now of being a tad too visually overwhelming almost every surface reflects every other surface and some of them are angled the Skybox spins at a slightly faster rate than you turn and the enemy projectiles whiz past and it can be a mess of shiny colors all around so we steal another nuke and blast our way into this spire and the Glide gets us onto a flying platform and this is another on-rails section you can't fall off so just keep shooting and you'll kill enemies before they can shoot back then a really janky fly through into a lit tunnel and it does sometimes feel like MDK is graphically pushing what the system could realistically do at the time with the speed it's trying to do it at but then we finally reach the boss the boss of this level is keeping enemies in zoo-like enclosures around this room he summons Boulders attack ships and grunts now these just endlessly spawn so Jump Around ignore the ads and focus on shooting his giant head and eventually his head just explodes MDK feels both Whimsical and yet gritty sci-fi at the same time it's a clash of emotions I suppose it's best described as Sirius sci-fi and strange boss down mine crawler stopped another stream to the end of the level and another dive and now on to level three and if anyone cares narratively we're now off to Scotland starting in one of the biggest battle arenas so far we shoot the hinges off this door which Falls outwards revealing another smaller door and this is a perfect example of how this level is weird inside this room we see two windows around the sides holding animals one holds a cow the other holds a seal kind of like the formaldehyde style art displays but if you jump at the Cow you'll unlock the secret cow level you're teleported to a mid-sized rectangular Arena enemies chase you and you need to destroy 20 of them but they are super tough so your regular gun doesn't do much thankfully you'll run into icons of Earthworm Jim and if you do this a cow will fall from the sky to crush an enemy this is a direct reference to the cow falling in the earthworm gym games killing all the enemies using the cows gets you a load of power-ups and then teleport you back back to the actual level but what if you jump into the other window the seal well you actually get exactly the same except the secret is called your fate is sealed and I do love a good pun enemies are faster now as well drop down this super long tunnel and find a giant blender the blades are spinning around a lift and we need to stop them how do you do this well it's obvious just shoot the three holding tanks in the other room each filled with a suspended grunt enemy this turns the tank water green and then the blood feeds into a tube which feeds the blades and causes them to explode of course it's so obvious this unlocks the lift and we reach a theater set brightly painted Forest walls this is one of the moments I remember vividly from playing this game as a kid because it's just so out of place what the hell now as a kid I wasn't able to understand why the art Direction was like this in a gritty sci-fi game I didn't realize what this bit was trying to tell me of course now as an adult I realize that this oddly colorful that is here because you know what no I still have no idea you get here on a lift surrounded by a blender and when you blow the walls of this setup it's an ambush from outside with a load of spawned enemies and I've got no idea what this bit is it's memorable though and again that is MDK to a t memorable but nonsensical but we're not done with the weirdness because the next area is a brightly colored painted room almost childlike in its Nursery style paint job without crops jutting around and enemies chasing after you and some Precision jumps to be made but the strangest aspect of this level is the music because I am sure I know this have a listen to the in-game music if YouTube mute this part for copyright I'll put links in the description the track in MDK is called a padded cell which might explain the strangeness of this level the Mind crawler might be a mental facility and this is what it sounds like thank you now have a listen to the well-known royalty-free track the Builder by Kevin MacLeod [Music] now bear in mind MDK released back in 1997 and Kevin MacLeod released his first album at least from what I can find in 2006 with the builder being a later composition on these both tracks are high energy piano focused with an almost identical opening riff so it's potentially likely that Kevin has played or was at least inspired by MDK push down this Corridor and end up in a shootout room High windows with bars over the walls and if this really is an insane asylum it would make a lot of sense because the Arts and Crafts are keeping the grunts happy and the cells and the padded doors are keeping them safe but then the game takes another unexpected turn you jump onto this hoverboard and get taken to an on-rails tour of this great lake you can't steer and you can't fall off but you can still jump and shoot so just survive this section before crashing into the main Minecraft body and facing the boss this guy has five tunnels which can spawn attack dogs and shooting him causes the protective ring around him to spin which eventually activates four lights and if you don't act in time the light shoot out as missiles thankfully you can hide behind the pillar to survive so when the lights do light up switch to sniper mode shoot them boss done no problem and next up we're off to the Arctic so we drop down a hole into the ice smash through a frozen layer and fall right into an ambush and this leads to another mechanic jump onto the snowboard the snowboarding sections are all very short you do have a minor amount of control over Kurt although you don't really need it because these bits have no challenge they are just a linear path there is no risk of failure just go forwards that is it this ends with you jumping into another huge Arena and this MDK does really well run around and shoot things that is The Game's bread and butter however there is now a terrible choice to make there is another bomber ship that you can hijack however I discovered that if you hijack a bomber ship while a grunt is shooting at you that grunt will continue to shoot at you and hurt you while you are in the ship and you cannot leave the ship or control the ship or bomb the grunt so you've just signed your own death want you cannot avoid damage you can't stop this you can't survive 5. if you board a ship at the wrong time this is bad design ride another snowboard down another ramp to a submarine stuck in an ice Strip This is a massive open area with flyover gunships grunts destructible scenery and a tangle the game does well there are also a few new enemies who ride jet engines and blast themselves towards you leaving a trail of fire in their wake kill everything in search of a nuke and then blow you away inside the sub and this leads to a mini boss which took me quite a long time because I tried shooting it for far too long this turret platform shoots two bouncing mines at you and to destroy it throw a grenade into the air updraft underneath it which sends the grenade into the platform and destroys it from within ride up the unlocked air current through the tunnel and outside to a submarine Docking Bay another standard Battle Arena Battle and then the final boss seems to be another bomb blasting platform like the previous except this takes five grenades to destroy instead of three thankfully if you do run out of grenades more just drop in the arena for you this boss feels more like a mini boss and the level abruptly ending is quite jarring here this is less a spectacle all than all of the other levels are next up we're off to Merry Old England but you'll notice during this intro Skydive that we're not alone Max or bones the dog falls down with us but they fall uncontrollably without a parachute so this isn't just destroy the mine crawler we're now rescuing Max as well this level starts with one of the best set pieces shoot down a massive assault ship and we're told shoot the pods this means sniper mode aim for the pods which just happen to be the bits shooting back at us so you can effectively use the enemy's ammunition like a trace around and follow it back towards where the danger is coming from taking down the ship isn't too difficult but it does feel rewarding and the next area has the biggest enemy yet a double-barreled missile launcher flying toward us and when you blow this up a truck falls out of it with a four-pronged forward-facing spike on the front which drives towards you so kill this quick once the area is clear a new mechanic a button stand on the yellow Square to remove the force field but leave the square and the force field reactivate so we need to put something on the button and this is the only time in the entire game you have to put something permanently on anything else now I chastised medieval a game with a lot of great design for only using mechanics once and not really fleshing out what they could be not diving into the potential of them and unfortunately MDK does need to get the same treatment the levels are physically big yes but they do really skip over some of the more interesting possible interactions because of the limitation of each Arena having to be self-contained it very much feels like they added a mechanic got bored forgot it added another got bored forgot it without really saying right how can we make everything we've added so far work as one great big cohesive experience a satisfying puzzle to solve with every mechanic the player knows I actually end up finding a secret passage by accident but this leads backwards but what this does mean is you can actually avoid activating the button at all if you make a very specific jump into what looks like a solid black wall but is actually a tunnel this leads to another giant assault ship except this one is moored up inside the arena and instead of flying far above it you can just use your machine gun so taking out the pods is much easier then we snipe the driver and this gets us into the globe room the globe room is a round room with a glass walkway around the rim and a globe in the center the room is staffed entirely by clones of the Mind crawler pilot and shooting the globe makes its Spin and when it spins fast enough it drops down through the room and smashes through the floor Unlocking The Way Forward by now the game seems to be working on classic point and click logic Escape the Room game logic why does shooting the globe make it spin why does it fall why is that a planned access route to the rest of the ship I swear everything about MDK is built around don't question it just go with the insane flow a nice little looping outside area sees us traveling from one side of a cliff to another via tunnels and then jumps to unlock a door and then another insane area with four more of those pronged trucks chasing me but this time you need to destroy them shoot the broken husk of the truck over to a block and use it as a step to climb higher and then this lovely bit a truck is driving around found a central ring and You Must Destroy it at a certain moment to use it as a step to Glide to the center that is a beautiful use of timing combat jumping and gliding to all stacked together and create a very nice puzzle this leads to the longest outside ramp but the only real gliding puzzle Glide down and land on the three updraft tunnels in sequence to Glide to the far door now you can still sidestep while gliding which is important for killing this enemy and the final door is perfectly placed to be very satisfying to glide into and here we find Max they have been strung up over what seems to be a tiny volcano unfortunately the boss is hiding inside a sealed cave and in the distance another gunship is drawing alongside and showering missiles onto us so this is a snipe the pods boss except you've only got a few seconds of the enemy ship being still before they do a strafing run above you and you're also on a small circular platform surrounded by a moat with a rolling Boulder in it now thankfully powerful ammo is plentiful and a sniper grenade takes out a pod in one shot so snipe down the enemy ship and the boss appears and grabs Max the mine crawling on is then destroyed and just like every other level the slipstream whisks you away however without Max to dive in and pull you out of the stream you're forced to follow it through to its final destination the stream Rider's home planet Lair of Gunter glut the leader of the invasion this is level six the final level you start on a circular outcrop and some Elites attack you a super machine gun makes short work of them and then we head up the ramp and jump into this fleshy tube this is essentially the corridor design but vertical this time the first room is a square expanse filled with ordered pillars Gunter himself is skipping around the outside of the room joined by a pack of attack dogs a few grenades sort out the dogs and then just Chase Gunter while shooting a lot he doesn't have a health bar but you know you're hitting him when the spray of pixels is coming off him eventually he'll charge into the center and dive through the floor deeper into the ship so give Chase and you'll arrive in another mirrored platform style room a longer Corridor with runs jumping in so this is a bit of platforming to navigate around Dodge some missiles and then descend down another tube eventually we reach a big open area with Gunter on top of a plinth and almost every enemy type now joins in and there are power-ups scattered all around including an earthworm gym cow drop power-up battle your way through the waves of enemies and take some sniping pot shots at Gunter and eventually a pillar close by will fall over creating a ramp to reach the plinth so drop down the final hole to the final boss the gun to fight is actually a big puzzle and needs almost no weapons to finish you can't hurt Gunter at least not from the outside and this is in theme because I've realized everything in MDK has been about getting inside something and destroying it from within the Mind crawlers themselves lobbing mortars into tubes throwing grenades into updrafts to carry them into turrets the one consistent theme of MDK is everything is armored from the outside and weak from within so how do we kill Gunter well he's got Max the dog strong up above him held by four wires each wire connected to a nuke Lock And Over The Far Side of the arena is a food dispenser jumping on the button by the dispenser releases a seal which you can grab and then throw out as an item and if you do this Gunter will go and eat the seal and every time he does a world's smallest nuke will float down grab the nuke ride up the air current to a platform that hasn't yet been opened throw the nuke and open the lock repeat this three times and you'll free MAX who instantly has a genius plan they dive inside the food dispenser and appear out of it disguised as a seal so you grab Max as an item feed him to Gunter and gunter's greed becomes his downfall because after being eaten Max performs some insane martial arts and explodes Gunter from within leaving only legs and a rib cage Max's dog rescue vessel then flies in and we ride out of there with the teeth of the vessel dropping off as respawning bombs cue the credits which have no music and that's MDK it's short surreal sci-fi the whole game is about three hours long there are a bunch of one-off mechanics never fully explored the plot is absurd the game plays fast and flashy so now we've replayed it was it actually any good critically and commercially yes MDK was a massive success and Nick bruty was asked to create a sequel but he felt he needed some time away from the series to grow creatively and really make mdk2 something bigger and better he said that jumping straight from earthworm gym 1 to earthworm gym 2 didn't give him enough time to develop a worthy sequel but unfortunately the game company were not willing to wait for Nick and so instead they handed mdk2 over to BioWare at the time an unknown company who was still working on their first game a small RPG called balder's gate which I've actually reviewed on this channel as well MDK 2 scored highly in all categories in all releases and a third game was announced in 2006 but never followed up on now I played mdk1 as a kid and I remember being longer and harder but now I realize I was likely just bad at it sometimes a game knows exactly what it wants to be and does that one thing really well sometimes the game has too many additional extras and tends to water down the core experience I feel MDK does both it's a fast-paced third person absurdist shooter with lots of enemies exploding into satisfying Showers of pixels it does this very well it's a first person super accurate sniper game with a selection of ammo and distance shooting puzzles it does this very well and it's a platforming jumping and gliding game it does this acceptably that's more of a support structure between the gameplay moments but it's also got random snowboarding bits which seem tacked on the single use of a button to open a door that you don't really need the bombing runs taking over enemy ships which you can't control I feel these additional bits weaken the game overall because they're so lackluster compared to the rest of the game running gunning and sniping it's a fun three to four hours of zany crazy gameplay the bits that work really work and the bits that don't at worst just slow down the journey between the bits that do so ultimately yeah it was fun frantic and just a little bit far out it was extremely intense but never quite made the splash it needed in the gaming world to secure itself as a long-term franchise I think maybe it was a bit too weird for the gaming world at the time so we need a score that says yeah it's powerful and it's good and it's enjoyable but it's just not quite big enough or popular enough to carry on so I suppose I will award MDK world's smallest nuclear explosion out of 10. cheers for watching another massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon Twitch and YouTube who keep the channel alive you can support from only one pound a month check the video description for links to the patreon twitch Twitter and our Discord and as always remember foreign

Channel: Josh Strife Plays

Views: 105,112

Keywords: classic gaming, retro games, older games, retro review, gaming reviews, nostalgic gaming, nostalgia games, playstation 1, playstation 2, n64, dreamcast, classic rpg

Id: leXEapd82QQ

Length: 40min 1sec (2401 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023