Max Mustard Review

thesixthaxis.com:

There’s a fair few VR platforming mascots that have come and gone, the likes of Astro Bot and Lucky graduating to broader flatscreen adventure, leaving a gap for new heroes to fill. Enter the quite adorable, yet inexplicably named Max Mustard. Can he make the cut?

The game begins with a large, tentacle-y alien robot kidnapping a bunch of adorable critters, called Mudpups. Just as it’s about to get its tentacles on you, Max Mustard turns up and scares it off, so you immediately team up with Mustard to fight off the alien’s various minions and save the Mudpups. By controlling Max with your robot-VR-controller hands. It’s a platformer, it doesn’t need to make perfect sense.

The platforming in Max Mustard is similar to that of his VR platforming predecessors. It’s essentially a classic platformer but rendered in a world that’s wrapped around you in 3D, so you can physically move your head to look around and follow the character through the world. There’s also more player interaction with the levels, whether it’s shooting guns with your actual hands, peeking around corners for hidden collectibles, that kind of thing.

You’ll accompany Max through four arcs, each of which has its own overworld map to work your way through, freeing Mudpups and collecting coins as you go. The platforming here is good, but not particularly notable. It does everything competently, but it doesn’t do anything particularly special. However, being a VR game does help make it more notable.

In addition to some of those coins and critters being hidden behind corners or other places that are easy to miss if you’re not careful, there’s also things like the plunger gun that you get very early on that turns a level into a platformer/shooting range at the same time, or the vacuum gun that allows you to suck enemies up and launch them at others.

There’s some nice touches without these specific tools as well, such as one area where two coins were definitely out of reach of Max, but I was pleasantly surprised