Mutant Chronicles: Doom Troopers, a Retrospective Review

Reviewed by Tim. S

 

 Around four years ago during late 2007, there was a time of my life I’ve dubbed “the eBay explosion”; I was scouting out some old DOOM paraphernalia (I was also experiencing a perpetually simultaneous “DOOM explosion”). During that time, I stumbled upon an odd-looking Super Nintendo game titled ‘Mutant Chronicles: Doom Troopers’. Well, it had DOOM in the title, so based solely on that merit I put forward the $10 or whatever it was and took the punt. Hell, got nothing to lose except a couple of dollars for what could be a lousy game, or a kick-ass game to add to my collection, right?

I didn’t take the game particularly seriously when I first plugged it in; I only really wanted to check that it worked, then played it for maybe 30 minutes, lost my patience with it then shelved it in my cupboard of mystery and left it there ever since.

However lately I’ve been curious about this oddity; why has no-one else ever talked about it? I haven’t met another human being who’s actually played or heard of it, nor do I know anything about its prefixial “Mutant Chronicles” title series.

After doing some research, I learned the ‘Mutant Chronicles’ franchise began in 1993 as a pen-and-paper role playing game set in a post apocalyptic world; however, since then the franchise has er, mutated into a series of spin-offs including a trading card game, a miniatures game, a board game, a comic book series and finally, a pair of console games released on the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, and the Super Nintendo.

Lacking any sort of familiarity with the source material, I’ll be judging the 1995 SNES game purely on its merits as a stand-alone experience.

One hyped-up point of the title was specifically the graphic and bloody violence in the enemies’ death animations. Man, it’s gruesome for a Super Nintendo game; after unloading a barrage of bullets into a monster, his head pops off and blood sprays everywhere. However, against every modern instinct where decapitation leads to instant and irreversible death, here the suckers just stand around firing blindly into the air until you bludgeon them their headless bodies into bloody submission.

Perhaps the game’s most glaring shortcoming is the particularly short and linear nature of the campaign. The game is only twelve levels long, divided over four planets which might sound fair, if not for one level of each planet being devoted to a boss battle, effectively reducing the games length to only eight levels long.

You haven't really won anything in life until your mug is plastered over some urban castle

Coupling this, with the fact that the early levels are a mind-numbingly linear “keep-walking-right-until-you-reach-the-edge-of-the-screen” fare, then it’s clear that innovative design wasn’t high on the developers’ priority lists. Having said that, levels further into the game do make a genuine attempt at non-linearity, with one level even involving an assault on the reactor core of an enemy base, leaving only sixty seconds to escape with your cajoles intact.

However this mostly falls flat as it happens completely without warning, the game suddenly changes tack and expects you to adopt a hit and run advance, requiring a circuited approach to the level. The biggest problem here, is that to open up the necessary exit path to escape the reactor core, you need to destroy a particular switchboard pretty much right at the beginning of the level; this is very easy to miss, and as no other level in the game features any destructible assets this is bound to be a sticking point of frustration.

The game just doesn’t offer you any real reasons to go exploring; the power-ups aren’t that helpful, and they don’t carry over when you die, which is also a real problem; on more than a few occasions I’d grabbed a special weapon power-up, only to realise my life was down to 11%; I’d either have to spam all my special ammo, or just die and forget I’d ever found anything cool.

Speaking of death, Doom Troopers is a strangely mixed bag when it comes to difficulty; the difficulty settings lack linearity; I played through the game on the ‘Easy’ setting, and most of it was just a complete cakewalk; the hardest parts were working out the safe terrain from the death zones. The level design was somewhat frustrating in that sense, as the environmental design was often ambiguous as to what actually passed for safe terrain.

That platform is about to go all Houdini on your ass

Several times I’d be walking along to see my character fall right through solid ground and into a pit of instant, fiery death. Other times, he’d grab onto a ledge halfway inside the ledge, and there were times where you’d just have to take a lucky jump and hope that whatever the hell you landed on wasn’t going to be some kind of wacky mirage. Still, boundary and navigation issues aside, the environmental graphics are appropriately dark and ominous, and are very well suited to such a grim journey of trepidation.

Legal disclaimer: shampoo on this planet may or may not melt off all your flesh.

 Doom Troopers also suffers from some genuinely frustrating control issues; To aim in any direction other than straight ahead, your character must come to a complete standstill and then you must hold the right shoulder button which allows you to choose any of the eight directions with the D-pad to shoot in. Why you have to go to this awkward aiming mode to shoot doesn’t make much sense; why couldn’t you just aim anywhere right off the bat, and only use this still-aim button for when you DIDN’T want to move anywhere for a careful shot?

Even then, the idea of careful shots is laughable. The game offers no targeting system or anything to help you aim and you honestly have no idea if your shot’s even going to connect; it’s not so much of a problem if you’re shooting at a monster on the same plane as you, but if you’re trying to hit a target directly above, or diagonal to you then you’re on your own. Just got to fire and hope it hits.

Graphically, the game is a mixed bag; it looks alright for 16-bit standards, but doesn’t feel like it properly utilises the power of the console; the game doesn’t seem to use any of the SNES’s coprocessors or tiling effects, with only a touch of Mode 7 effects in the final cut-scene; there’s a little parallax scrolling on some of the background and foreground objects in some levels, but overall the game’s visuals look to be down-sampled to the lowest common denominator of the 16-bit era (being the Sega Megadrive specifications).

Don't accept any sexual favours from this guy

Some of the pre-rendered graphics look alright; the opening scene features an impressive full-screen render of some butt-ugly mutant thing, and the rotating models of heroes Mitch Hunter and Max Steiner look pretty cool too. The in-game graphics are generally acceptable; while some of the animation looks good, the enemy sprites can look somewhat nondescript. Then again, they’re mutants, maybe it’s intentional. 

Bleeding to death, or mourning the lunch he spilt all over himself?

 

The variety of enemies in the game also feels a little limited, as they come in three basic types: The first type the player encounters are the Legionnaires, who are the basic, rifle-wielding mutant grunt found on all levels, all over the place. After taking some damage, their head will pop off and they’ll remain stationary and fire in random directions until permanently killed. They can occasionally be found hanging from trees, chains or other environmental paraphernalia.

The second type, the Necromutant is a blade-wielding berserker who comes flying at you with all piss-and-vinegar. However they’re not actually that tough and aren’t too bright when it comes to jumping to safe platforms versus pits of certain death. Also, if the player scores a hit on them while they’re mid-air, it’s an instant kill.

The third type, the Dark Legion is the heavily armed shock trooper. Wielding both rifle and grenade launcher, these guys are something more of a threat; the grenades can do a bit of bouncing around before detonating, though it turns out these grenades are just as dangerous to you as they are to his own compadres; often in crowded situations, it’s not uncommon to see a Dark Legion bombing his own comrades- the prospect of dying a fiery, explosive death doesn’t seem to phase them to the point of reaction though. Upon taking enough damage, they’ll lose their legs and their sentient torso half will continue to shoot the still-working rifle at you.

You’d better get used to these guys, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of them while you’re sluggin’ it out with Doom Troopers. There are four bosses in total, though sadly they’re nothing too spectacular. The most interesting was the boss of Mercury, who’s invincible to both your normal and special weapons, so to defeat him you’ve got to shoot his little boomerang-blade-thing to send it out of control to hit him. I didn’t realise this until I’d depleted all my ammo along with numerous lives but it was actually a relief to experience a somewhat intelligent boss battle; an experience that involved more than emptying clip after clip of bullets into his face, which is basically the rest of the game as well as every other boss fight.

The final and perhaps most important question regarding Mutant Chronicles: Doom Troopers is: Is it fun? I can safely say yes, the game is a hell of a lot of fun! It’s far from the perfect experience of a game, it's quite short, there’s not much variety with the monsters, and there’s only has one damned weapon. But I challenge you to find another Super Nintendo game that lets you smash your boot into some sucker until he pukes his guts up. It’s not the most intelligent or even memorable game, but there’s something about it, as if it’s some kind of diamond in the rough. I can’t help but wonder how a modern day remake would turn out. 

Even advanced alien races can't resist tacky clichés