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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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| 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.
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