Another week, another twin stick shooter washes up on the shores of Xbox Isle, and this time the game in the crosshairs (see what I did there) is the amusingly named Mustache in Hell; a game put together by Idunasoft and QUByte Interactive.
This promises to be yet another retro styled twin stick shooter, but with the promise of added comedy. I like a good laugh. Care to come with me to Hell!?
Story? Well, kinda. We are John Mustache, a hard boiled cop who awakens from a strange dream to find that the Grim Reaper has a job for us. He wants us to recover five cubes from various sections of Hell, and of course they are held by the biggest and baddest baddies in the region, aren’t they? So, it is a case of grab your gun and just keep shooting, until we either have all the cubes or we are dead. Which do you think is the most likely outcome?
On a more positive side, Mustache in Hell looks okay. The sprites of our hero, John Mustache, and the various enemies are large and have a lot of personality, whilst the rooms that we do battle in are sparse and simple. The thing is, they usually fill up pretty quickly with enemies, so it is forgivable. The game seems to bear up pretty well under the strain of moving all these enemies and bullets around too, and I haven’t noticed any slowdown while playing through.
The way that the story is presented is via the medium of text windows, and the localisation here is not great, to be brutally honest. The English is somewhat garbled, and the jokes are laboured, almost dead on arrival. I can honestly say I haven’t so much as cracked a smile while playing, which is a shame. Still, maybe things get better when it comes to gameplay…?
Well, sort of. What we have here is a basic twin stick shooter with basic twin stick shooter controls. As always, the left stick moves Mustache around, while the right stick not only aims his equipped weapon, it also fires it. This is fine when it is the default pistol in hand, as this has infinite ammo, but the other weapons that we can grab from chests in the encounter rooms don’t have infinite ammo, running out after a certain number of shots.
The only other buttons we need to worry about are LT, which actions a sprint, allowing Mustache to escape trouble, dodging away from big demons charging at us. From there, RT fires the secondary weapons that we can pick up. These are explosive in nature, and are either grenades that explode when thrown (preferably into a large gang of enemies) and mines that can be laid on the floor, delivering big bangs when an enemy touches them. Trying to lay the mines in the path of enemies is quite an art form, let me tell you!
As we explore the various realms, we find keys in chests (alongside health and extra lives), and these keys are incredibly specific. As soon as you pick one up, there is a golden arrow that appears near you, indicating which door it is the key for. Once the door is opened, it’s on to the next room, and then more fighting, and so on and so forth. Eventually you will reach a boss room where you have to fight a much larger foe with much larger attacks, be that Cerberus’s fire streams or the second boss’ vomit attacks. They all represent a new level of challenge. However, what they don’t represent is any increase in the fun available. Mustache in Hell does get incredibly samey very quickly – find a key, shoot some baddies, find a key, shoot some more baddies, and so on and so forth; there is no variation from this pattern.
Obviously more enemies spawn with additional health the further you go, but this is another issue – you have one crack at the entire game, and once your lives are exhausted, it is all the way back to the start as a fresh run gets set to begin. I didn’t feel massively motivated to try all that again, I have to confess.
Mustache in Hell is the very definition of middle of the road. It isn’t the worst twin stick shooter, but it does commit an almost unforgivable sin in the world of video games – it is just bland; it is just some video game, and there is nothing here that will have you hooked or push you to play some more.
You can do worse than join Mustache in Hell, but you can also do a hell of a lot better.
