It's amazing, M&M's has so many games, and ALL of them are PUTRID.
What threw me off at first was that I was expecting a 3-D platforming game that played like Crash Bandicoot, and yet, the first three levels are driving stages. They are OK. It doesn't make much sense for Yellow M&M to be avoiding crazy traffic, but hey, it's not awful by any stretch. You also get funny FMVs every three stages. Which, you know, pretty neat. So, you get to the fourth level... and it's a Crash Bandicoot clone!
Yellow M&M can jump, bounce on boxes and enemies and even gets his very own spin attack. Your main collectible are M&Ms which are obtained by breaking boxes. There's even red BOMB boxes that explode after three seconds, like Crash's TNT boxes, and Green boxes that instantly kill you. Brown boxes hide power ups, such as higher jumps or an extra hit. In Crash Bandicoot an extra hit is clearly symbolized by having Aku Aku flying next to you. Here... you get a small hardhat symbol at the bottom of the screen. Oh, and there's also a speed up power up.... which is absolute garbage, as it makes you too fast. Bonus stages have you running towards the camera, much like a few stages in Crash Bandicoot.
It's not too soon before you'll realize that the collision detection in this game is horrible. So many times I died because I was CLOSE to the chocolate spill, but didn't even touch it. Sometimes you won't even notice why you died or took a hit, did you touch a wall? Too bad, you die. Why? Who knows.
It doesn't stop there, the jumping, the most basic of functions, feels off. It seems you fall to the ground too quickly. You don't bounce from jumping on top of Bomb boxes, which is very weird, and using the spin attack to break boxes just feels.... wonky. Some boxes offer a very slight resistance that pushes you back a bit, instead of just letting you plow through them, like in Crash. It really doesn't feel good to play this game.
Remember the collision detection issues? This holds true for platforming. Sometimes you'll swear that you should've landed on top of a box, but the game decides that you should fall to your death. Oh, and if you jump off a moving platform... you keep the momentum. Say, you jump forward from a platform that is moving left? You'll be pushed left as you jump forward, sometimes even holding right won't be enough to help you land safely on were you wanted to land. If you jump off a floor that pushes you backward, once again, you'll have something pushing your jump backwards. It's awful.
And I don't know how they managed to do it, but some platforming challenges are hard to understand, because it's hard to gauge if some platforms are moving upwards or forwards. How? How did they manage to make such a nightmarish visual effect?
The third sets of stages was the absolute worst by far, perfectly encapsulating why this game is so terrible. First of all, you are constantly running over a conveyor belt, so you've got momentum against you when it comes to platforming. Then, there's the fact that even though there's perfectly solid looking ground below the conveyor belt... you can't touch it. Just make it look like a bottomless pit then, otherwise it makes no sense.
Then there's the collision detection issue. In one of the stages I was trying to land on top of a grey, metal box. And I was always dying ON TOP of the box. This meant I was landing on it. So I thought that maybe metal boxes were meant to be obstacles... only for me to, only seconds later, perfectly land on another metal box. This is how bad the collision detection can get.
And then, probably on the third stage of this third set, there's a part in which a door opens and there's a gap between conveyor belts. You can't jump between them, because the momentum won't let you... you must run through the gap. And you'll make it just fine. Play the stage a bit longer, and another door will open at the last minute, revealing another gap. But you must jump this one. Not that I died because I tried to run through it, as when the door opened I didn't have enough time to stop running forward and jump.
No lie, this is one of the worst games I have ever played. Ever. It's an absolute disgrace, and I actively hate anyone involved in the making of this game. It's broken to the point that it's almost unplayable, and it's incredible how they even managed to even moving around feel terrible. Honestly, it doesn't get much worse than this.
0.5
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