➕Super stylish art/graphics
➕Adrenaline rush gameplay

🔹Every time you boot the game, it’s like it’s for the first time?

➖Boring upgrades
➖Can only save every 10 floors (ex, quitting on floor 7 puts you back to floor 1)
➖Gets repetitive pretty quick

The game world is flashy, but shallow. Considering each level is randomly generated, every level consists of the same handful of tricks. You start off simple with jumps and slides, then get acid floors, lasers, and fans. But despite all this, there’s not much to the levels, especially considering how fast you blow through them. There only interactivity comes from picking up finisher weapons, “Health” machines, and explosive barrels.

The narrative seems purposely bland and a play on 80s-90s action flicks. There’s nothing really noteworthy other than killing robots and robot billionaires. #Eat the rich.

While there’s a really cool concept here, the gameplay seems almost as shallow as the world the more you play it. The gimmick is that you have 10 seconds to live each stage. You lose a second or two each hit you take, and gain time with each kill, forcing you to move and kill as fast as possible. Most levels are completed in under a minute. If you run out of time, you die and have to start over at the floor x0 (10, 20, ect).
There’s really only shoot, slide, and a finisher. Being a rogueLITE (small permanent upgrades), there are various weapons and upgrades to get between levels, but I think that the gameplay actually works against the fundamentals of roguelite upgrades. The coolest part is the weapons, but everything else is kinda meh.
The problem here is that when the objective is to blow through levels as quick as possible and you naturally kill everything in 1-2 hits, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for cool things, and I promise you that “+1s” life or “More protag voice lines” are not great.

I spent most of my time playing on the “Lenient” mode with some dabbling in the next difficulty up, “Challenging”. I found there to be a somewhat big disparity between the two that could definitely be related to a “Learn 2 play” issue. Lenient, which seems to be Normal mode, was fine. Some failures during harder spots, but very doable. Challenging was very hard. I don’t believe I completed a single level before I kept running out of time.

This seems like the biggest draw of the game. It’s absurdly gorgeous and has a look and feel of a 90s anime or comic book. It’s SO good. Everything from the UI to graphics are just done to near perfection.
My one minor gripe here is that the game performs oddly each time you start it up. It asks for language, and you have to choose a game setup, all like your opening it for the first time. Strange.

On the technical side, I had no issues and encountered no bugs, it ran smoothly.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | Windows 11 installed on SSD

Good, not great. It leans heavily on the 80’s synthwave music.

Good voice acting as well.

Good, after the ~4 hour main story is endless mode and boss rush, both with leaderboards. The roguelite gameplay style does lend itself well to replay value, but it’s not the best.

Mullet Mad Jack (MMJ) is a stylish FPS game with a unique twist on its main mechanics that forces players into a fast-pasted murder fest in order to progress. The key thing about this game is the STYLE, it’s visuals are amazing, like a 90’s anime. Unfortunately, its style is perhaps the only selling point of MMJ because the gameplay mechanics seems to be at conflict with the time/rush focus of the game.

The major thing I didn’t enjoy was how pointless upgrades were. No matter your base weapon or a weapon with the lowest power, everything dies in a couple hits. Combined with not having life or much need of a defense since you just need to kill things faster, and it seems like many of the upgrades are boring at best and worthless at worst. Does a 2% explosive bullet chance, 10% enemy miss chance, 20% slow bullet chance, or 10% less boss HP sound thrilling to you? If yes, then ignore this entire paragraph.

There is some great fun to be had though. I did enjoy my unlimited ammo minigun that fires grenades. I did like the finisher ability that grants full life (time), and the constantly kicking enemies into objects is fun. But once you get past the initial rush, I found it fizzle out pretty hard. What you do the first 10 minutes of the game is the EXACT thing you’ll be doing forever, so I really wish there was more meat in this roguelite experience.

Overall, yes I do recommend MMJ, but there are much better games out there that provide nearly the same adrenaline rush experience while actually having some depth. Check out some titles like Severed Steel, I Am Your Beast, and Metal: Hellsinger for some better alternatives.


$20 is very costly for this game. Even the historical low of $14 is steep. I’d say under $10 is fair.

You can find my curator page here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Synik_GR

gas

The game where you perfectly time kills and melee executions, and the game where the screen is constantly filled with pointless, useless visual noise would ideally be two different games.