‘Mutation Nation ACA NEOGEO’ Review – No, More Mutants
It's hard to explain to our younger readers just how popular mutants were in the 1990s. There has never been a better time to be a genetic oddity, what with Marvel's X-Men going to new heights and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles slicing and dicing their way into the hearts of kids everywhere. Every company with mutant characters seemed to be pushing them forward, and every company without mutant characters seemed to be making their own. Even just the word "mutant" was enough to get people's attention. So it probably didn't come as a surprise when SNK released Mutation Nation ($3.99) for its NEGOGEO system in 1992. A beat-em-up with a lot of mutants to fight? Why not, why not?
I've talked before about how SNK tried to find a popular beat-em-up brand to call their own on the NEOGEO before they got big with fighting games, at which point it didn't really matter anymore. Mutation Nation may not have been its best effort (that probably goes to the Sengoku trilogy), but it was better than most. Back in the day, it got good reviews, and most people still think it's good today. It also made a lot of money for a while. I think they are right to do so. It does the genre well and has a couple of good hooks.
As with most arcade games of the time, the story isn't very clear. Some crazy scientist did some genetic experiments that got out of hand and changed normal people into monsters who want to kill people. Ricky and Johnny, two young men, come back to town after being gone for a long time. They decide to stop the mutants by using their hands and feet. Even though neither of them is a mutant, they both know how to fight. By picking up power-ups along the way, they can also use a variety of special attacks. Their journey will take them through six stages that are a good size and have some really strange creatures. The boss fights are especially over the top. That's the end of it. Even the end doesn't give us much information.
But, hey, it's a beat-em-up arcade game from 1992. You didn't come here to see Chaucer. You want to bash some heads in, and Mutation Nation is good at giving you that chance. You might have to look around for a while before you find the head, but that's a different story. The strange thing about this game is that it works so well because it plays things pretty straight. You have a button to attack and a button to jump. When you press the attack button, you do a string of attacks. When you press the jump button, you jump a good distance. When you press the attack and jump buttons together, you do a special move. There's no cost in energy, but it's not as strong as similar special moves in other brawlers.
You have some cool tricks up your sleeve (figuratively speaking, since Johnny doesn't believe in sleeves). If you pick up the things on the streets, a letter and some numbers will show up in the status area. Just hold down the attack button until your POW meter fills up, and then let go. You can then use one of a few super moves (the letter tells you which), which do a lot of damage over a large area. The only other thing you can do is a simple grapple attack, which I forgot to mention before. Just pretend I told you that in the last paragraph, where it would have fit better with the theme.
The small number of moves actually works well for the game. This is mostly because the basic attack combo is both effective and fun to use. Jump kicks work better here than in most other SNK beat-em-ups, which is a big plus. The super moves add a little bit of variety, and you can get the items you need to use them often enough that you don't have to worry about wasting them. Your hits feel nice and solid, and I'm pretty sure I've said before how important I think that is to a good game in this genre.
But what makes Mutation Nation stand out, in the small way that it does, is its colorful group of enemies. They often change in the middle of a fight, and their designs are unique and gnarly in all the right ways. It adds a lot of variety to the game and keeps it from being like most street brawlers, where your enemies are just a bunch of different people in weird clothes. Part of the fun is seeing what weird things will pop up next, and as I said before, the boss fights really show off some interesting ideas.
Even though the game doesn't have a lot of fancy graphics, Mutation Nation makes good use of the NEOGEO's technical features. The backgrounds look great, and the characters are big and detailed. The way the monsters move, especially when they change, is really cool. The main characters also move well, and even though they look like they were made in the 1990s, they have a lot of charm. The music leans heavily toward rock and sometimes goes into what I call "butt-rock," and there's nothing wrong with that. For a beat-em-up that came out in 1992, the graphics are really good. Over the years, it has been surpassed by many other games, but it still holds up well.
Now we head to the part of the review specific to this ACA NEOGEO version. To likely no one’s surprise, there’s little to talk about here that we haven’t talked about before. The touch controls work well with the simple two-button action, and you can use an external controller if you’ve got one and prefer to play it that way. If you have two controllers, and only if you have two, you can also enjoy the fun two-player mode. You can choose from the usual options, like Japanese and international versions of the game, a Caravan Mode, a Score Attack mode, and many settings to change. The usual things about looks, sounds, controls, and difficulty. Hamster's way of putting these things together is always the same.
So yes, the usual complaint about how I wish we could do some online multiplayer, but otherwise I don’t have a lot to complain about with Mutation Nation. It’s a really fun beat-em-up that holds up well and plays nicely on mobile. The way the game works might not be the most original, but it does what it's supposed to do well and has a lot of fun sights and sounds along the way. I don't think I'll rate another NEOGEO brawler higher than this one until Sengoku 3 is added to the ACA NEOGEO mobile lineup. Well worth the meager asking price, that’s for sure.
