GameShark | Reviews | MDK2 HD Review

Game: MDK2 HD

Platform: PC

Publisher: Beamdog

Developer: Overhaul Games

ESRB: T

Genre: Third-Person Action-Platformer

Players: 1

What's Hot: The main cast looks great. Sound quality is impressive. Classic, nostalgia-inducing gameplay. Still hilarious.

What's Not: Choppy gameplay at high resolution. Very glitchy. Inconsistent visual quality. Shows its age.

Review by: Connor Cleary

You heard it through the grapevine: MDK2 would be updated and re-released. Could it be true? Oh, joy! That's what I thought anyway. Unfortunately, MDK2 HD is rather disappointing. Nostalgia-junkies will love the mostly-unaltered gameplay, the still-hilarious atmosphere, and the re-created cast. But whether or not the game will run smoothly on your gaming rig might be a bit of a crap-shoot.

If you never got a chance to play the original, it’s a bit of a cult-classic. MDK2 is a third-person action-platformer originally released in 2000. Each level you switch between one of three different protagonists who each have their own unique play-styles. Kurt Hectic is a janitor-turned-action-hero wearing an advanced combat exoskeleton called the coil suit; his levels emphasize sniping, sneaking, and gliding around. Dr. Fluke Hawkins can MacGyver various items together into weapons and gadgets like the atomic toaster or the fishbowl-space-suit; his levels involve a lot of creative problem solving. Lastly, Max is a six-legged robot-dog with a taste for fine cigars and finer weaponry; he can equip up to four guns at once and—as you may have guessed—his levels involve shooting everything, everywhere, all the time.

My personal experience with this game was rather maddening. However, if it weren't for these performance problems, I imagine I would have sailed through the game with a satisfied grin firmly plastered across my face. Unfortunately, due to the potential idiosyncrasies of PC gaming, there's no way to know whether MDK2 HD will run well on your system or not without access to a playable demo—which is currently not an option. Overall, it feels like a nice paint job on a car that hasn't been maintained.

Even though my computer's specs far exceed the suggested system requirements, I experienced severe performance issues at any decent resolution—which seems to defeat the purpose of an “HD” remake. Even at the lowest possible resolution, I'd hit serious chop any time anything remotely interesting happened—as in, fighting or platforming. This made the game just shy of unplayable.

While the main characters and bosses have all been re-modeled beautifully, with high polygon-counts and high-res textures, almost everything else still looks straight out of the late ‘90s or early aughts. While this juxtaposition serves to make the updated models look great, it also makes the rest of the game really show its age. In fairness to the “HD” claim, MDK2 HD's sound quality is fantastic—that is, when it's not glitching.

After communicating with the development team, they seem very attentive and are actively patching the game. So maybe in the near future the above-mentioned problems won't be an issue. Until that time, I can't recommend picking this one up. If the news of the HD release has got you itching for MDK2 again, think about hunting down a copy of the original.

Writer's Note: If you have a way to test the game on your computer and it runs great, then I do highly recommend picking it up. i.e. If Overhaul releases a playable demo, or if you have a buddy who already owns the game who can pull up his/her Beamdog account on your PC so you can test it out.

Connor Cleary is a contributor to GameShark , Gamasutra , and GameCareerGuide . His video game writing archive is called The Blue Key , and he runs a freelance web and graphic design business.