Nintendroid’s Lazy Boy No-Chew Review: Muscle March (WiiWare)

Muscle March (WiiWare)

Bandai-Namco

2009

Proof-positive that even the funniest jokes get old after a while.

Muscle March has a lot going for it in terms of it’s premise. Thong-wearing bodybuilders and a polar bear chase random thieves to recover their stolen protein powder in surreal surroundings to an uber-kawaii soundtrack.

If you laughed or at least smirked reading that, good. Now read that paragraph over and over for about five minutes. Gets old pretty quick huh? That’s Muscle March in a nutshell.

The first time playing it, I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen in a video game. After playing two levels of the game and hitting a wall with it’s ridiculous spike in difficulty, the joke gets old and the game gets downright frustrating.

Before the game begins, you’ll select a character at the select screen. The options are purely cosmetic, with no stats that I could tell. So if you ever wanted to be a oily heartthrob with a long, curly mustache or a polar bear in a speedo, here’s your chance.

After selecting a character, a short cutscene will play showing a thief (ranging from a football player to an alien) stealing your precious protein powder. The bodybuilders yell out “THIEF” and the game begins.

The gameplay is motion-based and simple (at first). You mimic the pose on screen to fit through the hole in the wall that the thief has left behind. If you fail to make the right pose, you crash through the wall. If you crash three times, you restart from the beginning. Once you get close enough to the thief, a quick-time event will require you to shake the Wiimote and Nunchuk as fast as you can to dash and tackle the thief. Once you catch the thief, another thief comes along, takes up the protein powder and the chase begins again.

Sounds pretty simple at the beginning, the first two stages are fairly easy, then the game becomes all about luck. The motion controls in this game are decent but when the action picks up and the thieves start posing unbelievably fast, the motion controls simply just can’t keep up. So once you hit the third level of the game, it becomes nearly impossible.

Once you hit the game over screen about three times, and have to play the first two stages all over again the joke becomes stale. Muscle March has no multiplayer, two modes of play (story mode and “endless run”) and from what i’ve watched on Youtube, the game only has 6 or 7 levels altogether. Simply put, the novelty factor isn’t worth the money. 

 Muscle March is good for a laugh but I wouldn’t pay for it. It’s like buying your friend a 20 dollar blow-up doll for his bachelor party. It might be good for a hearty chuckle, but at the end of the day, he’ll probably throw it in the garbage and you’re out 20 bucks. Jokes on you.

My Grade: D