A Platforming Action Game on iPhone: Mutant Mudds

Mutant Mudds by Renegade Kid is an oddity. It’s tricky to balance control features and gameplay action right with platform games on the iOS. You’ll usually have horrible controls, or great controls and no real gaming to speak of. They’ve done a pretty good job with both this time around.

What are Mutant Mudds?

These aren’t your typical aliens. Looking like gelatinous muddy blobs, they have come to Earth to destroy the TV watching fun of the character Max and his grandma. This doesn’t go down well as Max grabs his jetpack and water cannon to take them out.

This was intended to be released as a Nintendo 3DS game, so the controls are button-type. It’s pretty typical for iOS gaming and they tend to be easy to operate. They stand up to the rigors of the game.

The basic controls of jumping, running or shooting are needed, but you’ll also have to get the whole hovering action down to a fine science. There are spots that you’ll need to hover to and then drop onto an exact spot to continue. The need to land on platforms that disappear and reappear again and continue to hover for periods of time are critical. All you have to do is press the jump button while Max is in the air. Press the button quickly again and he drops like a rock. Practice definitely makes perfect.

Mutant Mudds is much more about precise moves than speed. You’ll find plenty of time to get the hovering action down. Each level is riddled with items that are placed in either the foreground or background. You’ll have to venture through all to reach your goals.

The Gameplay

The gameplay for Mutant Mudds is layered, in a way. There are a total of 60 levels, 20 being the main ones. First you survive them, then you go back and collect the diamonds and last you open the secret levels. Doing that requires upgraded equipment to get to them. Those levels are also much more difficult, so you’ll want to have everything you use upgraded.

Upgrading your abilities takes a little work. You have to collect all 100 diamonds in each level. It allows you to upgrade to a stronger water cannon, a jetpack that hovers further and the vertical blasting power to propel yourself up into the upper portions of levels that you couldn’t get to before.

All of these items will come into play at some point, but you can only use one item at a time. Choose wisely.

The real goal of the game is exploration and finding areas you didn’t know about previously. It’ll keep you entertained for a long time. There is no rush to the gameplay and it’s a pleasant change from many platform games.

But How Does it look?

Overall Mutant Mudds is a terrific looking game. It seems to be retro 8-bit mixed with 16-bit visually. The colors are vibrant, especially on the retina screen devices. The music is addictive and the characters are detailed. The bad part is you need to be prepared to die. A lot. The gameplay is killer difficult. The only thing that would make it more stressful is having the areas timed.

The various hidden levels are easy to see, but reaching them is whole other thing. It’s nice to have such artfully done backgrounds to die in. There is a reason to do this over and over until you succeed. Once you’ve conquered all levels you can unlock grandma as a character for gameplay. She can use ALL of the upgraded equipment at one time. She’s able to get to even more hidden levels and the gameplay just goes on and on. It’s one of the better platform games available.