Max Mustard review: a traditional platformer, grafted onto VR

Max Mustard is an enjoyably daffy old school platformer given a virtual reality spit and polish. This is a genre filled with simple pleasures i.e. collecting coins, breaking boxes and stomping on the heads of cute creatures who were minding their own business until you came along. Old mate Mario is the godfather of this platformer, kicking it off when he famously took on the eponymous barrel-throwing ape in the original Donkey Kong. Many characters have followed in his footsteps—from Sonic the Hedgehog to Crash Bandicoot and a zillion other cute heroes. 

In this sense Mustard has big shoes to fill, although in a VR-specific context there’s not a lot of competition when it comes to other platformers. Perhaps because such old hat gameplay mechanics don’t exactly scream “the future of immersive media.” One major exception is Astro Bot Rescue Mission, which I enjoyed playing in 2018 on PSVR. It didn’t reinvent the wheel—in fact it feels like a production from another medium, grafted onto VR—but it was fun and zanily designed. Already that game is pretty much lost in time, very few people using the original PSVR anymore.

Perhaps this bolstered the business case to make Max Mustard: a Meta Quest release that, like Astro Bot, oscillates between third and first person. We play Max, a cute girl with flame-spitting rocket boots who rescues adorable flying animals that’ve been imprisoned by a villainous nasty-pasty from Central Casting. Sometimes we’re assigned a task to do in first person, for instance firing a plunger-shooting gun at targets and using a wind-activating device to move objects. A key challenge is making these occasional first-person elements feel more than gimmicky and extraneous, which neither Max Mustard nor Astro Boy really does; they don’t mount a convincing case that such a perspective change is necessary, even if some gameplay variation is welcome. 

The levels in Max Mustard are well designed, if a little narrow, feeling more like giant thoroughfares than worlds. The developers could’ve done more to spatially mix things up—finding ways to rotate leftward or rightward, for instance, or doing more to move us up and down, evoking a sense of verticality. There’s some examples of this here and there, including in the level titled Don’t Look Down, which includes a fun homage to Richie’s Plank Experience—another game developed by Toast Interactive. We move Max along a narrow beam high in the air, to the right of a sign reading “Richie’s Plank Experience,” then fall off it, sailing downwards into another zone. Generally the homages are less specific, though the first level of the third arc (titled Logs ‘n’ Frogs) clearly hat-tips Frogger. 

There’s something a bit odd about the way cute little Max gawks at you during times when she’s idle, looking up with ridiculously large, bulbous eyes, almost but not quite longingly or excitedly. It’s a difficult expression to place, but it does successfully scream “do something, activate me!” Moving Max through the game’s 40 levels requires navigation, not exploration; there’s never any doubt where we need to go, even if we die a few times getting there. 

Once Max arrives at certain points, we’re nudged towards her, so that she becomes easier to see and therefore control, occupying more space in the playing field. The game uses two of VR’s four key configurations, as outlined by Laurent Lescop in his 2017 paper Narrative grammar in 360. In the first the player and the virtual bubble are in a fixed position; in the second, the player and the bubble are moving. Like many popular VR games—including Beat Saber and Pistol Whip—we’re pushed along in a linear forward trajectory, with little to no reason to look behind us or even to dramatically alter our gaze.

Max Mustard has four bosses to battle, one for each arc. It amuses me how bosses in these sorts of games fight to survive while simultaneously giving us the very means to defeat them (laying stones to jump onto, for instance, and providing targets to shoot). But it’s not like you’ll play while pondering the decision-making processes of a giant crab-like robot. You go with the flow and fun. The gameplay is smooth and enjoyable, without bringing anything new to the table.