Dr Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine Review (PS5)

Dr Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine is a Super Meat Boy spin-off title from Team Meat, taking a well-known match-four mobile puzzler, similar to the likes of Puyo Puyo, Tetris, and Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine and adding it’s own saw-blade spin to the genre.

You’ll be aiding the titular Dr Fetus in his mission to recreate the ultimate villainous Meat Boy clone by weeding out the weak through his six worlds of test chambers, each consisting of 20 levels and a boss fight for good measure, making for a total of 120 stages. Across these worlds you’ll be matching together various colours of meat boy clones; positioning, rotating, speeding up, and slowing down the gelatinous blobs as they fall from the top of the screen to the bottom, avoiding various weird and whacky obstacles along the way, be it saw-blades, chainsaws, ghosts, lava, or electricity beams. In typical Super Meat Boy style there’s a very fine margin for error, and hitting any obstacle will restart the level instantly without so much as a second chance.

That’s really all there is to the game as every level is locked until you complete the previous and with the difficulty meeting that of the original Super Meat Boy, many players won’t even make it past the first world. It’ll have you cursing, rage quitting, and ultimately fill you with relief on each level completion, knowing you’ll never have to play that stage again.

The presentation is pleasant with a cutesy cartoony visual style and artful animations from the team behind Super Meat Boy and Super Meat Boy Forever. The art is accompanied by upbeat and catchy tunes from Ridiculon that’ll have you humming away to yourself in no time. The visuals and tunes make for some quirky, vibrant, and enjoyably comical short cutscenes that play out between levels.

Although Dr Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine is presented gorgeously and provides an interesting twist on the genre, it lacks the meaty content required to keep players engaged. The steep difficulty results in frustratingly repetitive level restarts, and with all stages locked with no hints, tips, or level skips the majority of players won’t see it past world one. There’s definitely more enjoyable ways to beat your meat elsewhere.