Xbox
Review

Mars 2120

by
on

Mars 2120 is another MetroidVania wannabe, but is it any good?

6

Going by the intro you (Anna “Thirteen” Charlotte) have crash landed on Mars. If you've seen nothing of Mars 2120 during its lengthy development you may be disappointed that a game that features a first and third-person intro turns out to be a side-scrolling 2½-D twin-stick shooter/slasher, with strong influence from the MetroidVania genre.

Beat a spectacular but dopey first "boss" and you'll unlock your first Core. This is Electric and charges ranged rifle attacks with energy and your melee attacks also get a sparky boost. It also unlocks purple doors and energises broken circuits.

Cores are based on elements and some enemies are weaker to certain elements and can resist others. The various elemental boosts come in useful as even a most basic enemy can take 24 rifle hits to kill on the base setting. As you discover and unlock the various different biomes the elemental aspect of your weapons becomes vital. The periodic boss battles are invariably hard, but with learnable patterns. To be honest, I just found them tiresome and unimaginative–I mean, how many reappearing, recharging, invulnerable bosses with unblockable attacks and minions to help them do us gamers have to endure? The use of discovered audio logs to (vaguely) explain the plot is hardly original either, is it?

Clockwise: Watch your step!/The camera zooms out in large locations/These ice creatures reform/The map shows the railcar link.

So, perhaps naively hoping for some innovation, I was disappointed by Mars 2120. It's rather retro with its line-drawn looks, and the gameplay is as unpolished as the animation of the main character–it's as if side-scrolling benchmarks like Prince of Persia and Flashback never existed. Combine these flaws with a substantial skill tree that seems to unlock at glacial speed (I don't think it's actually possible to unlock all the upgrades in a single playthrough), some sloppy typos found in menus and even the occasional crash during loading and this means Mars 2120 barely feels finished.

Mars 2120 will take you 5-6 hours to complete (the end of the game rushed up on me rather unexpectedly) but I think you're likely to get tired of the repetitive gameplay long before you see its most spectacular moments or the end of the game. This may be a tribute to the Metroid and Castlevania subgenre but I'm afraid it's just not a very good one–even at its budget price.

Thanks to QUBbyte Interactive and Plan of Attack for the review code.