Mr. Slime

Rating Everyone Genre adventure Publisher South Peak Games External Links Official Website

Brachiation – Noun/ Int Verb – To move by swinging the arms from one hold to another as in primal apes locomotion.  Imagine if you will a game where you play as a cute, innocent little slimeling and you use your arms to quickly and gracefully navigate colorful levels with a simple flick of the DS stylus.  Now, wake up from that dream and smell the day old burnt coffee that is the actual gameplay of Mister Slime.  Using his four stretching arms the player can try to make Senior Snot grab and pull himself through nearly harmless yet dreadfully long stages in an attempt to do what ever the game poorly instructs you to do.

Now, this title isn’t all tears and return receipts.  The first ten minuets for anyone child on up will feel refreshing and unique in the same way that a baby learning to walk is painful and time consuming.  If anything truly redeemable comes from this game, it is a painful skill check for the player to create the illusion of smooth locomotion and enemy dodging.  PROTIP: Enemies cause you to lose your grip!  The enemies in the game are little more than pathing annoyances, dealing little damage and are harder to fight than to avoid.  Combat normally involves finding the enemy, positioning yourself comfortably nearby, and finally using your head as a slingshot to knock them out of the sky.  Another terribly inconvenient move is having to fall down onto a chosen foe, but again, far more time consuming than effective.

Mister Slime gets high marks for simple cute design, easy puzzles, and impressive innovative controls; each of these are overturned by poor and lengthy level design, annoying time eating door puzzles, and slow clunky controls.  Perhaps another of the most breath-taking features of the game is the use of the blow feature.  By blowing at the DS you can soften Mister Slime’s landing and make him hover an inch off the ground, as well as blow out the fires that occasionally ignite our hero-ball-thingy.

This 2D “adventure” game is one of many upsetting Nintendo titles shoveled onto a convenient system in an attempt to take a month long development game and turn a quick buck.  Both the Wii and the DS suffer from huge amounts of Shovelware, and this contagious trend has only spread since the release of the platforms.  All in all, Mister Slime is one of many games that reached impressively and ambitiously high, only to be dragged down by rushed release and a shoestring budget.