McPixel Review

A lot of indie games have pixelated graphics. This is usually due to budget constraints, or to add to the overall artsy style of the game. McPixel is an indie game with pixel art graphics, but it is not going for the visual effect. In fact it is attempting quite the opposite. It is a comedy game, so to supplement this, the visuals are almost hilariously bad. At times the characters on screen are in the distance and are literally made of just a handful of pixel blocks. You cannot help but crack a smile when watching the animations of these minimalistic sprites. Luckily making you smile is the aim of McPixel, the first game to be released via Steam Greenlight, and thankfully the humor does not stop there.

You play as McPixel himself, and in each of the one hundred levels that the game boasts it is your job to “Save the day”. Somewhere in each level is a bomb, and you must prevent it from exploding. However, you only have twenty seconds to do so, or the bomb will explode and you will have to move on. The game is split up into Chapters, and then into smaller chunks called Rounds. Each round consists of six levels, which loop continuously until you have saved the day in each of them.

To stop the bomb from exploding, you click on things. You could try doing the obvious in each situation. For example, if you can see the bomb, you could try picking it up and throwing it out the window. Seems logical, right? Well, McPixel is more a game about humor than strategy, and doing what seems best probably will not turn out how you planned. It seems that our hero’s favorite action is to kick things, whether they are inanimate objects, or people, or highly dangerous explosives. It never fails to be funny when you think you might have found the solution to a level, only for the character to simply walk up and just frantically kick what you clicked on. Most puzzles can be solved in one or two clicks, so the action comes at you fast. Make a mistake and the bomb explodes regardless of the timer, so actions have to be chosen carefully. The main thing you have to remember when playing each Round is what you have already attempted in each level. It becomes a case of trial and error in some cases, where you simply click on something available and wait for the level to come round again if you fail, but it rarely feels like a chore.

The game delights in throwing you off track. Many levels seem to have a hilariously senseless solution, which makes it all the more funny when you try everything you can think of, only to have the most simple action possible be the correct one. An early level sees McPixel putting out a fire by urinating all over it. Naturally, when I was faced with a fire later in the game I clicked on it, expecting the same outcome. I should have learned by then that it would never be that simple, as I watched our hero fling himself helplessly into the flames. The humor is crude at times, with more than its fair share of human waste jokes. It is forgivable however, as there are plenty of funny moments besides these. When faced with a half naked man in a shower room with a stick of dynamite and a bar of soap on the floor nearby, I feared the worst. Thankfully, the answer was nothing to do with the soap.

Obviously the graphics are nothing special, and there are only two songs in the game, one for the menus, and one for the gameplay. These songs are catchy, but get frustratingly repetitive after a while. This is all to be expected from a game which is a mere fifty-nine megabyte download though. With so few assets it came as no surprise that I had no performance issues when playing. There is a surprising amount of content in here for such a small game however. In addition to the main game there is an option to download new levels totally free. You can also play Endless Mode, where the levels just keep coming at you until you get bored. Another neat thing to play around in the game is the ability to change the filtering options. These change the way the game looks, without changing the gameplay. It even shows a frames per second counter in the top left corner while you are selecting, seemingly poking fun at itself for drastically decreasing the frame rate when some filters are activated.

You can check how well you are doing on the leaderboards. They track how long you have spent in each level, and how many times you had to visit that level before you completed it. Upon completion of a level you earn a silver or gold award depending on how fast you complete it. You can revisit past levels by simply selecting them from the menu, or by playing them in Endless Mode. If you select completed levels from the story menu, your job is to “Find all gags” rather than to save the day. Here you beat the level by finding the specific joke outcome of each situation, rather than dealing with the explosives.

McPixel is an enjoyable little indie game. It is quite short, but the low price point seems reasonable for the content. The humor is generally good and well delivered, but once you have found the gags in each level there is no real reason to come back to it. In short bursts, it is fun, and the segmented style of the main mode complements this. If you are not the sort of person who is into slapstick and often rude humor though, it is perhaps to be avoided.