Nukezilla Review: Dr. Mazing in Infinite Energy Crisis (Xbox Live Indie Games)

Dr. Mazing in Infinite Energy Crisis has done the unthinkable. Having played as much of this game as I could stomach (I only made it to the fifth level before breaking down in tears), I have lost the will to play video games. Knowing that this game is around depresses me more than 9/11 and my dead grandma combined. Every bad stereotype and element you could concoct about the Indie Games section of Xbox Live is on display in this game. The gameplay is boring and repetitive, the aesthetics are blindingly and deafeningly bad, and every other element of the game is just shit. Read on and find out if I think this game is worth your Microsoft points!

This terrible, awful, no-good, very bad game begins with the titular Dr. A. Mazing (get it?) lecturing a class on some sort if infinite energy device he’s concocted. Shockingly, the device has caught the eye of intergalactic warlord Gazal Nim, who wishes to take it and do what we can only assume are evil things with it. It’s up to Doc Mazing and his assistant SomethingOrOther (I forgot her name already) to get the device to safety. This means running, jumping, and punching their way through ten levels filled with Nim’s robot armies.

Controls for this beat-em-up are head-achingly simple: the control stick causes movement, A jumps, X attacks, Y switches weapons. Simple, but still completely broken. You can’t move while jumping, changing weapons, or holding B (which is all that the B button does). That makes the jump-kick you can perform, like everything else in this game, extremely awkward. My eight-year-old Amish cousin could design better controls.

This would be a problem if the enemies were tougher than Nerf soaked in water. Gazal Nim should fire every single one of his minions if this is how they act. They constantly fight each other, get stuck on environmental objects, and rarely actually attack. The only danger in this game comes from the bosses, the mostly hair-pullingly frustrating sadists at the end of the levels. Rather than move like everything else in the game, the bosses have an ability to warp (read: stutter and glitch) to your position. Most of the bosses have close-quarter attacks that cause you to be stuck in the same place until you die. Others have ranged attacks that do absolutely nothing if you’re standing right next to them.

Doc’s attacks don’t really have a set amount of damage; each punch and kick is basically a roll of the dice, except the dice only has four, five, and six written on it. That means you won’t need any other weapon to take out roughly 90% of the enemies you come across. The other 10% must be killed from afar, so you’ve got to weaken them with the piss-poor lasers and grenades you can pick up. The grenade, when tossed, will hit anyone or anything it wants to, whether you intended it to or not. Same with the boxes and park benches you can find strewn across the levels. The weapons (the only three in the game) are depressingly weak, barely doing damage to anything.

Absolutely nothing about this game is pretty. The backgrounds look like they were done in a Chinese knock-off MS Paint program. Every animation looks like it’s causing the character performing the action physical and emotional pain. The different run animations keep going on when a character stops. The horrible doctor’s fight animation skips itself randomly in a “Oh God that man is having a siezure” way. Environmental objects explode, if you can call listlessly moving in mid-air exploding.

I could go into more of the shit this game feeds you (cutscenes that tell you nothing, random ships that crash and explode for no reason, etc.), but my soul is too tired to do so. Calling this game bad is being nice. There are zero redeeming qualities to Dr. Mazing. This is a game that, at some point, had multiple people saying to themselves “I can actually make money off of this!” That makes me sad about the world we live in. It’s not fun in any meaning of the word; it’s not “B-movie” good, or “so bad it’s good” good. It’s just awful. Not only should you never spend 240 MS points (seriously) on this waste of disc space, you should probably assault anyone you know who willingly has downloaded this.