Nukezilla Review: Agent MOO: Maximum Overdeath (Xbox Live Indie Games)

Once, a long, long time ago, there lived a Destructoid community member by the name of Agent MOO. In a further attempt to prove that the Dtoid community was one of the greatest online communities ever, he decided to make a game. The game would be a platformer/shooter that members could play amongst themselves, with achievements, leaderboards, and unlockables for performance watermarks. The characters would be community members and site editors, and there’d be all sorts of inside jokes for the members to enjoy. That game is Agent MOO: Maximum Overdeath, and I’m here as an ex-Dtoid community member to review it for you.

The creation of this game was based on wanting to beat the crap out of other Destructoid members, so it’s a multiplayer-heavy game. That’s not to say that you need other people to play it: Agent MOO wisely put in a feature to make bots you can play against. The game has four different modes of play. Of course, your basic free-for-all and team deathmatches are here. There’s also Hippietitis, where one player starts as a Hippie, armed with only a melee weapon, and must turn his opponents into hippies. If everyone gets turned, hippies win, but if one player stays unturned, they win. The final mode is the odd Ride The Whip mode. Using one of the games three vehicles (hot rod, helicopter, or Halo-esque Warthog), you drive at a high speed, then bail out of the vehicle while attempting to bounce on the hood. The addition of those two modes breaks up the monotony of the deathmatches. While it may sound strange, Ride The Whip is actually really fun to play, and is my mode of choice whenever I pick this up for a few rounds.

The platforming involved is generally tight, though there are some weak points. Much like Chelsea said in her review of Castle Pain, I’m against platforming that has a slight slip whenever you land, unfortunately present in AMMO. The game comes with five levels to decimate others on, and a few of them (The Barn, and Space Void) have small platforms on them. The slight slipperiness of landing on these platforms can cause you to suicide or miss your next jump. This is only a small nitpick though, as most of the time it’s hardly noticeable, Unless you’re playing on Space Void, which is the biggest pain in the ass level in the game. The other big problem area is the vehicles. Turning the wretched beasts is a laborious pain, as the car/chopper needs to come to a full stop before it can fully turn around. Plus these things explode for like no reason: hitting a wall ever so gently will almost deplete the vehicle’s armor level. It’s great wracking up the kills with these things, but it would’ve been so nice if the vehicles controlled reasonably well.

Let it not be said that this game lacks in the weaponry department. Battle implements start at the simple pistol, uzi, and melee weapon (a sack of oranges). The uzi is the most effective weapon I’ve used, and the sack of oranges bounces people pretty far (even further with a certain perk, which I’ll get to later). Then there are the explosives with grenade launchers, mine launchers, and the ROCKET LOUNGAH. Then there are the odd weapons like the freeze ray, tranq gun, and Moo Hole Launcher. Yes, the Hole Launcher is basically a Portal gun, but it’s the weakest item of the bunch; it doesn’t do any damage and its kind of hard to access the portals once their placed. Still, I was shocked to see such a great diversity of weapons to enjoy decimating your opponents with.

Not so shocking was discovering that this game has Moochievements. The trend lately with Indie Games is to make your own achievement system, as the games inherently don’t have Gamerscore-earning Achievements available. Rather than have these be arbitrary achievements, Moochievements give you new perks and characters to unlock with each new achievement, here called Nerd Points. These are gained through normal gameplay (winning certain matches, killing opponents certain ways), leveling up (gaining a certain number of points), and doing weird things (turning off the fucking annoying “PEWPEWPEW” noise).

These Nerd Points grant you unlockable character skins and perks. Starting out, you can only play as either Agent Moo or Mr. Destructoid. Earning Nerd Points unlocks basically the entire Destructoid staff, old and new, and goofy stuff like a hippie and Gentleman Dinosaur. The perks give you things like boosted jumping abilities, the Mario-like ability to cause damage through jumping, and starting each spawn with a different weapon. While the skins don’t do anything (other than make you laugh maniacally when you see Jim Sterling run off the edge of a cliff), they offer a nice diversity to the character models. The perks, which can be easily changed (even during gameplay) add a bit more to the experience that I wasn’t expecting.

Now you might be thinking “I have no allegiance to Destructoid. Can I still enjoy AMMO?” Whether or not you like Destructoid is irrelevant; there’s something here for everyone. Hardcore Dtoid community members will enjoy the references to their online home. Dtoid haters will enjoy beating the crap out of Jim Sterling and Reverend Anthony avatars. Everyone else will enjoy a light-but-fulfilling platforming multiplayer game that has a lot going for it. Hell, you might even to be able to play against yours truly if you’re up to it.

(What does this score mean?)

Disclaimer: Agent MOO sent us a review copy for the game.