Meep 2 – Jumping Evolved

Remember early last month when I reviewed Who Is God by Magiko Games?  It’s back.  Only it’s less sacrilegious, made by someone else, and it’s called Meep 2 – Meep Meep, Meep Meep.  Actually, it’s called Meep 2 – Jumping Evolved because otherwise the Warner Bros. people would be very upset.  And although it plays nearly identical to Who Is God, the graphics style and the game’s structure are completely different.  Otherwise, it’s still one of those “jump as high as you can get” type of games that have flooded the wireless market.  You play as a jelly-frog-thingie that is perpetually hopping around like he’s busting a kidney holding in a bladder full of piss.  Unlike Who Is God, this isn’t a randomly generated endless game.  There’s twenty levels filled with various traps and platforms.  There’s also items that can make you float automatically upwards, teleport you randomly in the level, or launch off in the opposite angle from which you hit them.

Meep 2 actually is a fun game.  It’s got clean graphics and a smooth soundtrack.  But it’s relatively low difficulty and lack of online leaderboards will make this a limited engagement.  To help out, it has local multiplayer, where you race a second player in split screen.  I didn’t get a ton of time with this mode, but it was okay.  Not spectacular or anything, and the limited view was aggravating.  Like many games I tackle for Indie Gamer Chick, Meep 2 is clearly designed with the kiddie crowd in mind.  Unlike some other titles that try that route, I actually think this will provide a decent level of entertainment while Mommy and Daddy are upstairs, um, talking sports.

My biggest complaint is the target times for earning trophies in each level.  Simply completing a stage will earn you the bronze trophy, which is all that is required to unlock the next level.  And thank God for that, because I could not get anything higher than a bronze.  I even tried replaying the first and thus most pussified level multiple times and for the love of all that is holy I couldn’t get so much as a silver award.  This is a pretty common problem on the scene.  Developers tend to lose track of reality because they’ve been playing their own product for so long that they become Gods at it.  Meanwhile, us mere mortals are left wondering what the hell they were thinking with these far-fetched challenge times.  I encountered similar problems in games like Pixel Blocked and Ninja360° and I still managed to have a good time with them.  And I did with Meep 2 as well.  Yet when I have trouble obtaining higher trophies, I always leave a game with the nagging feeling that maybe it’s really not too difficult and I’m as thick as a cinder block smoothy.  Nah, that can’t be it.  I’m fucking perfect.  Right?  Right?

Meep 2 – Jumping Evolved was developed by Andreas Heydeck

80 Microsoft Points listened to House of Pain in the making of this review.