Platform: PC
Developer: Shiny Entertainment
Publisher: Playmates Interactive Entertainment
Release Date: April 30, 1997
Genre: Third-Person/Overhead Shooter
Nerd Rating: 8 out of 10
Reviewed by bushtika
The morning dew glistens in the early sunlight. You step out to the porch of your suburban home to retrieve the daily paper and wave to your neighbor Jim. Seems like today’s going to be another scorcher. You return to your morning breakfast of eggs and coffee and relax into your chair. Suddenly, the house begins shaking violently with dishes and silverware clattering onto the floor. You look out across your lawn to locate the source of the disturbance and your jaw goes agape. Crossing the sky are huge streams of vermilion energy twisting through the atmosphere over a now blackened horizon. It takes your eyes a minute to adjust to your new sights, but the darkened area soon takes form as a massive city-sized tank grinding through the metropolitan area with a gargantuan excavation wheel at its stead. Can anybody hope to halt this extraterrestrial threat?
Invasion! An alien force appears through energy streams and begins to strip the Earth of its resources with city-sized minecrawlers. You are Kurt Hectic, a janitor working for the eccentric Dr. Hawkins aboard his space station, the Jim Dandy. When a race of aliens called “Streamriders” show up to harvest Earth, you don the experimental “Coil Suit” and infiltrate the city minecrawlers from orbit.
There are six full-length levels to explore withing the world of MDK, Each with their own theme and environment from icy tundras to shiny, metallic wastelands. Each level takes between 30 minutes to an hour to complete and feature many unexpected level features like snowboarding or conducting bombing runs from a low-flying aircraft. Every level ends with a unique boss battle as you engage in sniper fights or dodge an army of remote-control boulders in an arena.
As far as the gameplay goes, I feel that is game is the result of a bunch of game developers doodling on a napkin and making a game out of what they drew. Not that it is a bad thing, but it would help explain some of the stranger items like your four-armed cybernetic dog sidekick or the literally named “Worlds Smallest Nuclear Explosion”. The player is outfitted in the prototype Coil Suit, a form-fitting suit equipped with a wrist-mounted chaingun, a helmet mounted sniper rifle, and a back-mounted ribbon parachute. With these items, Kurt is able to traverse the battle field using platforms and fans to gain altitude and rain fire on his alien enemies.
The low-resolution environments offer quite a variety of scenery, with one being a room full of fake cardboard cutout shrubs and another involving maneuvering over broken, floating platforms while dodging a giant, swinging pendulum. I once hopped aboard a plasma cannon, overloaded it, and rode it like a pony out into the night sky. In regards to enemy design, the main foes are the “Grunts” who are the fan tailed opponents who change color and uniform in each world. You have the massive Sentries, floating beings equipped with a giant claw and a plasma cannon, juxtaposed to the small drone craft and alien canines gnawing at your armored heels.
Humor is certainly not in short supply in a game which was rumored to be an acronym for “Murder.Death.Kill.” My personal favorite was a health power-up which screamed and ran away from you as you tried to pick it up. Another fond moment is climbing into a malfunctioning, singing robot and sneaking past enemy guards. The aliens jump around, dance, and even sound like chimpanzees. Overall, the game has a very cartoonish vibe to it, despite the ultra-violence taking place around you.
Tommy Tallarico does a fantastic job with the orchestral soundtrack. The ambient tracks perfectly exhibit emotion over the current game area, such as when I crashed an upscale alien ball by literally crashing a large globe through several stories, all accentuated with violin and flute. Most of the start up credits in games are just there to stall you for a few seconds while the game loads, but the opening score hits me every time I start the program and helps immerse me into the world. As a post credits reward, you are treated to a music video combined with live action and recorded gameplay, performed by french artist Billy Ze Kick. It is odd and unexpected, though certainly not out of place for a game such as MDK.
As a wacky fun-house hidden within an ultra-violent shooter, MDK earns a well deserved 8 out of 10 for its innovative play style and humor. While it plays shorter than I would like, has graphics that haven’t aged well, and is a general pain in the ass to get running, I still hold this game dear in my heart. If you are willing to scour the internet for a patch, then this classic will be worth every cent. Make sure you have your chainguns loaded and your ribbon parachutes packed before diving headfirst into this adventure!
