MDK

MDK is one of many games by Shiny Entertainment, a studio known for their weird, zany, and counter-culture games. Earthworm Jim is probably the series Shiny is most known for, but for as iconic and comical as those games are, I can't exactly say they're especially fun to play. MDK, on the other hand, manages to balance Shiny's manic brand of creativity with some genuine gameplay chops, leading to an experience that still feels incredibly fresh to this day.

MDK has a fairly simple premise involving aliens tearing up the Earth with giant minecrawlers. Each of the six stages start with you skydiving onto each minecrawler before you're let loose to start gunning down aliens. MDK is a tank control game, but you move incredibly fast and have really generous auto-aim so the game still feels really fast and snappy. The arena design is fairly open and rarely requires any truly demanding movement out of the player, and combat involves a lot of fun circle-strafing as you weave back and forth around bullets. It almost plays like Mega Man Legends on crack. Compared to how jerky Earthworm Jim, I was really surprised not just by how smoothly MDK flows, but by how reasonable the difficulty is. Outside of a minor difficulty spike in the last two stages, I thought MDK was really fair the whole way through which is a stark contrast from how infamously punishing the Earthworm Jim games could get. But it also wasn't too easy either. Early on, the game showers you with health and most fights can be trivialized with circle-strafing, but as it goes on, you start to face off against tankier enemies with more complex movesets that deal greater damage, along with increasingly challenging sniper puzzles.

Oh right, the sniping! MDK's biggest claim to fame is that it's one of the earliest 3D games to have a sniping mechanic. At any point, you can switch to a first-person sniper view that can zoom up to 100% and can use a variety of different ammo types. It's a surprisingly fleshed-out system that gets a ton of use, between the many puzzles that task you with making tight trick shots, to boss fights that require precision sniping, to its uses in normal combat since the sniper bullets deal more damage than your normal gun. The sniper mechanic in MDK is what gives the game its depth and strategy, though admittedly it's also the part of MDK that I am the absolute worst at. Almost every boss in MDK requires the use of the sniper gun in some way, and it meant almost all of them felt like roadblocks for the unskilled sniper that I am. This is mostly just a skill issue though, I generally think this is a really cool addition and MDK would probably be worse off without it.

Each of MDK's levels have a very distinct flow to them. As I mentioned, you start out in a brief skydiving section where you land on the minecrawler while picking up upgrades. Once the level begins proper, it gets into a rhythm of putting you through a large combat arena before making you go through a short transitional hallway to the next arena and so on. There's such a wide variety of arena types that MDK tosses at you though, from massive battlefields where they flood you with enemies and power-ups to more cramped rooms. There's platforming challenges, environmental puzzles, and a ton of memorable one-off setpieces. The first stage has a brief stealth section where you hide inside an enemy robot, the second stage has these trippy mirror rooms, the third stage has an especially memorable bit where you enter a room that looks like a stereotypically bright grassland only for the walls to fall over and reveal an alien ambush, the fourth stage has snowboarding sections, and so on and so forth. There's never a dull moment in MDK because the developers are constantly tossing new and weird ideas at you, but the core gameplay is so rock-solid that the game never feels inconsistent or overly gimmicky. All six of MDK's stages are great in their own way and the fun, dynamic level design stands out as one of its best traits.

From a presentation standpoint, MDK boasts this strange, jagged, polygon artstyle that brings to mind Rayman 2, only a lot less whimsical. It doesn't look especially polished, especially in the PS1 version which also packs a very jittery framerate, but it helps MDK really stand out visually. Special props go to the robotic enemies which are fully 3D-rendered and pack a ton of personality in their animations, from how they run away screaming if you disarm them, to the way they taunt you when they're high up. The soundtrack by Todd Dennis (not Tommy Tallarico) is also really great, it's an epic orchestral score that feels like it's taking the game way more seriously than the game itself is. MDK is at its core a very tongue-in-cheek game not too dissimilar from Earthworm Jim, with tons of strange comedic bits, quirky gags, and jabs at gaming as a whole, and the fact that the music is so sincere almost heightens the game's offbeat tone.

Overall, MDK is just a really cool game, one that manages to cram in so much pure fun into its brisk 2-3 hour length. While lacking in polish in some areas, it manages to be a surprisingly consistently fun ride with fast-paced gameplay, impressive sniper mechanics, varied level design, and a delightfully strange tone. Out of all of Shiny Entertainment's games, I think it's fair to say MDK is their magnum opus.

4/5 Stars