Download Size: 150 MB
Time Played: 30 minutes
Levels Completed: 33 out of 89
What I'd Pay: $2
Steam Price (3/25/12): $5
It's a bad sign when you spend your entire time playing a game wishing you were playing other games. Everything in Mutant Storm Reloaded felt so standard, so mindnumbingly boring, I looked at shooters I had labeled "average" with fondness. At least they had some quirk or sense of style that made them stand out. This game feels like a cheap imitation released in the 90s.
It's your standard dual-stick shooter. Each level is a contained room; you warp in, enemies warp in. You shoot all the enemies until they die. You get a set number of points per kill and a time bonus at the end of the level. There's a combo bar, but it's only filled up by shooting things wantonly and thus never required much thought. Sometimes powerups drop, but they don't last long. There's also an auto-adjusting difficulty, but it takes several perfect levels for that to kick in so you can pretty much ignore it. And that's it for gameplay.
The graphics and sound feel like they're a decade old. The bright garish monsters and distorted backgrounds of the levels wouldn't look out of place on a 3DO, while the music sounds like generic background sci-fi horror and often skips noticeably to the point of distraction. Even the port is lazy; when i saw the menu prompts still had the Xbox button icons, I was relieved I was able to aim with the mouse. I was honestly scared I'd have to use WASD and the NumPad as dual joysticks!
Only get this shooter if you absolutely can not afford to spend $5 more on something better, like Really Big Sky or Scoregasm.