Patreon button  Steam curated reviews  Discord button  Facebook button  Twitter button 
3DS | PC | PS4 | PS5 | SWITCH | VITA | XB1 | XSX | All

Ex-Mutants (Genesis) artwork

Ex-Mutants (Genesis) review


"This game is bad, bad, bad, bad. How bad? Here's the premise: You were once a mutant. Now, though... Now... you're NOT. "

This game is bad, bad, bad, bad. How bad? Here's the premise: You were once a mutant. Now, though... Now... you're NOT.

That's right! All those cool X-Men mutants like Gambit and Havok and all of them are nothing compared to these soldiers. Why? Because they USED to be mutants. Mutants are different in this universe; they're ugly and grotesque. Our heroes were stripped of their mutant properties and they're happy as hell about it. Now they're just commandos fighting for a team called the Ex-Mutants for some reason you will absolutely not care about. With such a terrible, horrible premise for a videogame, it would have taken a miracle programmer to pick up the pieces and make even a decent game.

Instead, this was coded by ''Malibu Comics Interactive.'' And you're in for a long day.

The Game

Ex-Mutants is based off of some comic book. As little as I remember about comics from when I was a kid, I do remember that Malibu comics sucked. Playing this game brings back memories of why, as the ''story'' behind our heroes makes about no sense.

Apparently, the world has gone to the crapper and humans are all ugly, foul mutants. All except six, however, as a cyborg scientist has brought three back from their mutations. The rest of the world is overrun by EVIL MUTANTS lead by a SUPREME OVERLORD MUTANT named Sluggo. Sluggo runs the evil mutants pimps up, hoes down. That is to say, he has set himself up against all things human. This immediately raises the following questions:

If a mutant used to be a human, why would it hate humans so much?
If there are only six humans, can you really wage a war with humanity?
Why would a cyborg take it upon himself to revive humans?

But in a bad game, plot holes are almost requisite! And bad this is! Ex-Mutants is the essence of generic. If you take out the extremely charisma-less heroes (a guy named ''Ackroyd'' and a gal named ''Shannon,''), this really could be ANY bad platformer. Levels appear to be random in nature; one minute in a warehouse, the next in a cave, etc. The enemies have all been seen before, and are really not detailed enough to be more than templates for better games. Enemies that first appear as liquid drops but then become small mutants? Check. The blue monsters with the ripped pants in Altered Beast? Check. Swinging pendulums? Oh yeah. If it's been done before, it's in Ex-Mutants. And guaranteed, it was done better than it was in Ex-Mutants.

And it never stood much of a chance. The aforementioned lame character designs? They're pitiful. ''Ackroyd'' is not a name I would EVER give anyone, let alone some ''super'' hero. Ackroyd swings an axe. Great. ''Shannon,'' another power name, is equally as unimpressive with her nunchucku. The thing about it is, though, that BOTH WEAPONS LOOK THE SAME. I swear, before I read that her weapon was the same thing Michaelangelo swung, I thought she was using an axe too. Doesn't matter. They both suck and fit well in a game that sucks so bad.

Nothing in this game is fun. Not finding the hidden stars (''hidden'' in clever places like... item boxes), not platforming around the simple level designs, not fighting the cheesy looking enemies, nor killing the ones that take, say, FIFTY hits to kill. Ex-Mutants is a game of such primitive quality, it feels like a homebrew game, or some generic movie license cash-in that swaps sprites with the engine of another generic game. Jumping isn't fun; the levels suck. Enemies suck, they aren't fun to kill. Character designs suck, they aren't fun to play. And the story sucks, you just can't care about it.

The Delivery

It's not the worst example of 16Bit graphics, but it's not one of the best. A weak showing of parallax is about all this game has to save it from the abyss. It looks terrible, but not SNES Home Alone 2 terrible.

The characters are really small. Noticeably small. They jump funny, just like all the other animations are funny, or minimal. So sparse is the animation, that characters basically levitate into the air until their descent before a change in animation is seen. Enemies suffer from this lack of care as well, as they have the same animation quality found in a three page flip book. The colors used to represent the game are surprisingly varied; it's a shame that the ones picked aren't exactly the most complex the Genesis can brew up. Doesn't matter. It's fugly; several Master System games as well as a few NES games outshine this (minus the parallax, mind you).

Equally as bad as the sights is the sound. The programmers worked overtime to find ways to make MIDI sound like hell. Bad ''bass'' effects and bad digitized synth elements are used to compose some bad music. Generic, too, but bad as well. And the bad voice samples, such as ''Yeah'' and ''Oh yeah'' are as bad in the talent as they are in the game's garbled delivery.

The Truth

Ex-Mutants sucks. It feels like a lifeless clone of an already lifeless game. It was an amateur effort by an amateur team, and the result is nowhere near the quality I've seen in some amateur games. There is no reason to play this game, ever. In fact, this game should be forgotten, as well as its inherent symbolism that bad games can be made from bad source material. Ex-Mutants is less a game than a soldier in a Trojan horse full of crappy carts the world has seen. My rambling point: Stay far from this, this perfect example of what makes a limp, tasteless game.



ethereal's avatar
Community review by ethereal (March 14, 2004)

A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.

More Reviews by ethereal [+]
Strikers 1945 II (Saturn) artwork
Strikers 1945 II (Saturn)

A Psikyo shooter is a pretty recognizable thing. If you've had some history with the company's shmup fare, you could easily have won a ''Name That Developer'' challenge with, say, the Dreamcast's Gunbird II. Similarities amongst their games prevail in every nook and cranny, from their obviously similar 2D coding to the...
T.R.A.G. - Tactical Rescue Assault Group: Mission of Mercy (PlayStation) artwork
T.R.A.G. - Tactical Rescue Assault Group: Mission of Mercy (PlayStation)

T.R.A.G. wasn't even a great concept to begin with. Its base elements manage to be generic AND completely plagiarized at the same time. It wanted to be just a boring action game; T.R.A.G. feels like it was destined to be completely one dimensional in its craptitude. The developers, in a moment of pure idiotic ingenuity...
Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage (Genesis) artwork
Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage (Genesis)

Over the years, Acclaim has tortured the world with its arduous library of licensed fodder, ''original'' garbage and malicious mixtures of the two. Acclaim has consistently released turd after turd into the underpants of the videogame world, soiling the seats of gamers and leaving its foul streaks to never be forgotten...

Feedback

If you enjoyed this Ex-Mutants review, you're encouraged to discuss it with the author and with other members of the site's community. If you don't already have an HonestGamers account, you can sign up for one in a snap. Thank you for reading!

You must be signed into an HonestGamers user account to leave feedback on this review.

User Help | Contact | Ethics | Sponsor Guide | Links

eXTReMe Tracker
© 1998 - 2024 HonestGamers
None of the material contained within this site may be reproduced in any conceivable fashion without permission from the author(s) of said material. This site is not sponsored or endorsed by Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, or any other such party. Ex-Mutants is a registered trademark of its copyright holder. This site makes no claim to Ex-Mutants, its characters, screenshots, artwork, music, or any intellectual property contained within. Opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily represent the opinion of site staff or sponsors. Staff and freelance reviews are typically written based on time spent with a retail review copy or review key for the game that is provided by its publisher.