[Introduction]
MDK (Murder, Death, Kill, abbreviated for marketing) is a fast-paced third person shooter in which you take the fight to invading aliens by dropping from low orbit and landing on their minecrawlers. Your goal is simple: fight your way to the boss of each respective minecrawler, take them out and get the hell out, preferably before any more cities get demolished.
This all sounds quite serious, but I promise you that the game is actually really rather silly.
[First Impressions]
If you bought the game on Steam and you're running a modern OS on modern hardware, then you might notice something upon launching the game: namely that it doesn't run very well, if at all. What a bummer. But before you request a refund, don't worry, because there's a fix for that:
Download the MDK Steam Fan Patch, it not only allows the game to run on modern systems, but also adds widescreen support, brings back a couple ending cutscenes that were removed from the Steam release for some reason and a few other neat things.
With that out of the way, you can actually play the game! 5 minutes in, you can also realise that the control scheme is weird as hell, quit to main menu and rebind the keys in the options.
NOW you can actually play the game, and it won't be long before you realise it's gonna be a strange one, because MDK starts as it means to go on.
[Development]
Would you believe it if I told you that this game started its conceptual life as a doodle born from frustration with being too family-friendly? It's true; Nick Bruty, arguably the original creator of MDK, had gotten tired of games like Aladdin and Earthworm Jim, so he drew up some concept art of an armored suit with a machine gun and a sniper helmet. This would later become the coil suit, but back then, it become a sort of proof of concept. Bruty paired it with a story draft and put a team together to put things in motion.
The video game market was, at the time, replete with what was known as "DOOM Clones," so called due to the popularity of DOOM. Today, we know them as first person shooters, but the team knew that this wasn't what they wanted anyway. They wanted something different, something that would stand amidst the dross, something that hadn't been done before. While they didn't make the first 3D third person shooter, they were among the earliest. And they certainly set themselves apart from the likes of DOOM.
Motion capture was used in animating both enemies and the player character, and this may well be the first game to have separate motion scrips for individual limbs. The whole game is written in a unique programming language built from scratch. Every level was intensely playtested and subsequently optimised so that the game would run at a bare minimum of 30 FPS at all times. The game doesn't even require a GPU, and was designed around specs allowing even very basic contemporary machines to run it.
I want you to really understand how wild this is for a 1997 title. We're talking about a game that has no fancy tricks like reducing quality or not rendering distant objects. And this is all in a true 3D world, with the sole exception being the player character, whose model is a sprite. Everything else is texture mapped polygons. These aren't small levels either, and they all feature substantial vertical movement, a not insignificant number of enemies (whose projectiles all move in real time - no hitscan here!) and elements destructible through scripted events. Hell, some are destructible by the player outside of scripted events.
The enemies all possess a decently capable AI as well. Sure, every hostile alien SOB will beeline towards you if they've seen you and you move out of sight, but in a firefight, they'll make use of cover and stay mobile if none is available. Granted, most of them aren't as nimble as you are, but they'll do their best. Failing that, they might panic and run away or hit the deck and cower in fear. They'll also react to limbs being shot off and adapt to being disarmed, falling back to their remaining weapon(s) if they lose one.
Oh, yeah. You can dismember enemies, who will then adapt to you shooting off their arms and/or legs, and without meaning to beat a dead horse too much, this is still in 1997.
Another neat thing is that every level had a separate designer. This resulted in a pretty good variety in level design, with one even taking inspiration from James Bond movies of all things, perhaps most obviously The Spy Who Loved Me.
That said, development wasn't necessarily a smooth affair. Several design aspects have changed. Crucially, MDK was apparently once intended to be much more stealth-focused. There are still remnants of that idea in the game. Occasionally you will be able to sneak up on enemies, and the sniper mode definitely allows for a more thought-out approach to certain situations, but make no mistake, this is an exception rather than the norm. The vast majority of the game will be spent running and gunning.
The concept proposal video also portrays a far less silly and much darker game, with greater emphasis on the aforementioned stealth mechanics. What we might have gotten if the earliest design documents had never changed is unknown and, I suppose, largely irrelevant, particularly considering that we won't be seeing a new game in the series anytime soon.
[Game Mechanics]
You run, you gun, and you don't stop running or gunning until everything is dead or you reach your objective. The core of MDK is a simple affair of holding down the trigger while dodging incoming fire and keeping an eye out for power ups. It's not quite a bullet hell shooter, but as enemy projectiles are actual physical objects moving along a trajectory in real time, often over significant distances, you will occasionally run into blankets of incoming fire.
While your chaingun lacks the same kind of range, being a hitscan weapon that only shoots so far, your sniper mode allows you to engage distant targets with a variety of munitions. This includes mortars, homing bullets and even painting an area for a bombing run. Unlike your chaingun, the sniper mode is not a hitscan weapon, necessitating leading your shots when dealing with targets in motion.
Unusually, sniping affords you a zoom of up to 100x. This might seem excessive, and it kind of is, but while you'll only rarely be using that level of magnification, it comes into play more often than one might think. It's a smooth zoom, too. No momentary cut to black as you jump between zooms. This, along with the bullet cams following the trajectory of projectiles, makes sniping impressive both as a tool with which to take out enemies, and as a technical accomplishment.
There are also a number of fairly rudimentary puzzles. They're all things like moving a certain object to a certain spot to open an exit, so don't expect anything particularly challenging. Honestly, half the time, the challenge comes less from figuring out the solution and more from actually implementing it. If you have to move something, you're gonna be pushing it by shooting it, and the direction in which an object moves when shot at might not be what you expect.
The aforementioned powerups are about what you might imagine. Put a chaingun on your chaingun to increase firepower until your chaingun's chaingun runs out of ammo. Throw portable tornadoes at groups of enemies. Apply the world's smallest nuclear explosion to a locked door in order to open it. Present your foes with the world's most interesting bomb. It's all really rather silly. But then, they were also all invented by Dr. Hawkins, who isn't exactly the most grounded person in the world, what with being a mad scientist who built a space station out of recycled aluminum cans.
[Graphics]
I've mentioned that the game was relentlessly playtested to maximise performance.
Truthfully, this did come at the cost of visual quality in certain areas. For example, in particularly hectic levels, you may notice that some surfaces have been flatshaded, i.e. have a single, solid color. However, this certainly is not universal, and far more often than not, MDK provides a shockingly good graphical presentation.
That's not to say that everything is necessarily pleasing to the eye. One particular level features a section of the minecrawler which was apparently used for some kind of artistic experiment, but to be fair, this is an odd one out. By and large, despite every level having a different designer, a common aesthetic is preserved, but with each crawler having its own identity. This is reflected by the grunts, your most common opponent, having different appearances depending on which minecrawler you're aboard.
If nothing else, you're certainly gonna come across some pretty unique stuff. There's often an odd blend of comical and serious. On the one hand, the interior of the minecrawlers often feature massive industrial landscapes and sinister machinery. On the other, they also often feature stuff like the aforementioned arts and crafts project, or the ammo storage where grunts are carrying around ridiculously oversized artillery shells.
All in all, as with everything else about MDK, the graphics are impressive for their time.
[Story]
You are KURT HECTIC (yes, really) and you are going to SAVE THE WORLD!
Of course, you don't want to. You're literally just a janitor working for a mad scientist who got bribed with Hungarian goulash in exchange for going to space. Your boss, the "esteemed" Dr. Hawkins, built a space station to study "Flange Orbits" and only managed to convince you to stick around by showing you how to work the VCR.
Unfortunately, it turns out that Flange Orbits aren't real, but rather than return to Earth and face ridicule, Dr. Hawkins opts to stay in space until he events... something. Anything, really, so long as it's useful. He spends years on various projects, including creating a coffee machine that ends up destroying parts of the space station, as well as creating a genetically engineered cyborg dog named Bones to help around the station. Not only does Bones not really do much to help, instead spending most of his time in his vegetable garden, but both he and Kurt prefer the name Max.
So, here we have our motley crew. A mad scientist, a janitor, and a 6-limbed bipedal dog ostensibly named Bones, but really named Max. Dr. Hawkins, as it happens, eventually becomes aware of an "energy stream" penetrating the galaxy from the rim. And, because his research quote: "indicates the farther away an object is, the smaller it appears to the human eye," (except the Sun, apparently), he deducts that the stream is not growing in mass, but actually approaching Earth. He tries to warn the planet, but no one takes him seriously.
Turns out they should have, because the energy stream is actually a means of transportation for the so-called Streamriders, a group of aliens who travel between planets, stripmining them with enormous minecrawlers the size of Chicago. Although Dr. Hawkins briefly forgets about the aliens due to actually sleeping for once, as well as having a dream about "all humans having an evil twin in the form of a masked chicken," he promptly plans a daring mission to save humanity once he remembers.
Now, the good doctor just so happens to have an advanced suit of body armor with an integrated chaingun. Unfortunately, he himself is old as hell, and Max has two arms too many, so Kurt is elected hero of the day.
And this is just from the game's manual. We haven't even launched it yet.
[SPOILERS]
There's not much to spoil, really. Once in-game, the story is told pretty much exclusively through the environment.
Max gets captured by the BBEG (having apparently fallen off the space station along with some power-ups) after Kurt foils the Streamrider attempt to stripmine the planet, but Kurt of course rescues the cyberdog, kills the final boss and saves the world.
[Pros]
- Provides a fairly unique experience
- Gameplay is entertaining, if somewhat simple
- Certain gameplay elements are still impressive by today's standard (smooth 100x zoom!)
- Zany humor
[Cons]
- Requires a fix to run on modern systems
- Even with the fix, the game is finnicky (I got at least 1 hard crash to desktop)
- Certain gameplay elements are rudimentary by today's standards
- What made MDK impressive in 1997 is, of course, not particularly impressive in 2021
- Rather short for what it is; a playthrough likely won't take more than 4-5 hours, if that
[Conclusion]
In the sense that it pushed the boundaries of PC gaming technology to their limits, MDK is effectively the Crysis of its time, except it was actually optimised extraordinarily well and could run on basic systems. What we really have here is a playable case study in cutting edge 1997 technology.
Mission: Deliver Kindness.
Moral compass: optional.
/DUX
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