The Haunted Hoard: The Mummy Demastered (Switch)

In 2017, The Mummy released in theaters in a bid by Universal Pictures to create a cinematic universe similar to the highly successful Marvel Cinematic Universe but with their stable of classic movie monsters. This attempt to follow the leader ultimately fell flat, but over in the video game space, the tie-in game took a surprisingly inventive approach. The Mummy Demastered is not attempting to look like a modern game at all, instead hearkening back to SNES style exploration-focused platformers and shoving aside most of the movie’s plot in favor of exploring it’s own version of a confrontation with the film’s villain Princess Ahmanet. In fact, if not for a pixelized face of Russel Crowe appearing beside mission text, there would be little hinting at this game’s movie inspiration, The Mummy Demastered able to produce solid action and beautiful pixel art because it wasn’t shackled to simply reproducing a film’s events.

 

In The Mummy Demastered you are an agent of the Prodigium organization whose purpose is to respond to supernatural threats, but you aren’t taking on the role of Nick Hunter from the film. Instead, you are a deliberately faceless agent who enters the area where Princess Ahmanet’s magics have produced warped creatures and hostile life. As Dr. Henry Jekyll keeps you notified about where in this initially subterranean mission Princess Ahmanet’s powers have been detected, you’ll find yourself heading to eerie and unusual areas. Deep in abandoned subway tunnels or biological labs with experiments let loose or above ground in a sand-swept city or moonlit forest you’ll be shooting your way through whatever stands in your path, but if they manage to win the confrontations and you perish, that is essentially the end of that agent’s story. Another Prodigium agent will appear at the last save station you used and enter the fight with very little health and only a default submachine gun, but that agent who met their end will still roam thanks to Ahmanet’s magic reanimating them. Once you’ve found your previous self and taken them out you’ll be able to scavenge all upgrades and weapons off of them as well as thankfully a good deal of health to offset the cost of the battle, this element more a nifty concept born from playing as interchangeable soldiers than something difficult or game-changing.

When the adventure begins you will just have your submachine gun that can aim in eight directions, the side-scrolling areas you explore at first filled with manageable monsters that your basic weapon can take out without much trouble. As you progress and start to find new weapons though, you’ll find even simple foes can take a good deal of your default weapon’s shots and keep fighting, so you’re incentivized to utilize your new tools despite their limited ammunition. The assault rifle is basically a strict upgrade in speed and strength but you won’t just tear through all the creatures in your path because you’ll want to conserve ammo so you aren’t relying on your weakest option if you run low. The shotgun gives you strength but less accuracy while the flamethrower is heavily powerful but requires you to get in pretty close if you want to fry something. You can only carry two weapons besides your submachine gun though so the incredible destructive power of the cluster rocket launcher might not fit your style as much as two more reliable but simple weapons, but with a few guns to find if you are being more thorough in your exploration you can eventually make a weapon set good both for dealing with the fairly pesky foes found around the world and the incredibly durable bosses who won’t be dropping much ammo during their fights.

 

Exploration isn’t just about repelling the monsters in your path, although with many having quick movement or good aim on their long range attacks they are legitimate threats that ensure traversal is challenging and peppered with many quick but engaging little skirmishes. To get to certain areas though, be they the way onward or some secret paths with extras like health upgrades or power boosts, you’ll need to find scrolls that provide special abilities. While being able to cling to the ceiling actually opens up a few interesting ways to fight battles like the one against a giant crocodile boss who otherwise provides little floor to stand on, most of these abilities are simple expansions to your skills like a higher jump or the ability to head underwater. The run also perhaps needs to better communicate when you’re getting up to the speed required to clear a long gap since it’s activated simply by walking rather than a button press, but the grenades you acquire that open up different barrier types also provide you a new attack option in combat separate from your three weapons. The explosives come in a few varieties like an incendiary that leaves fires to deal more damage to targets and a remote bomb can help you better ensure you actually damage the game’s quicker bosses, and if you do go exploring around the world the optional Phase Shift move that lets you charge through the air also expands your attack and movement options in a more interesting manner. Being able to head back and explore areas you couldn’t reach earlier does mean getting a better jump isn’t an empty upgrade, but the upgrades that change the ways you can move and fight are certainly more exciting than such small boosts.

Boss battles in The Mummy Demastered are actually fairly involved and lengthy skirmishes despite being few in number. While you’ll be able to fire on them the whole time, it’s likely you’ll completely work through all your weapon ammo and explosives to wear them down, the game ensuring that for most fights you will have to learn the boss’s attacks and how to dodge them in order to win the battle. Nothing in your tool kit is really a shortcut to victory, this also ensuring that the monsters you’re facing on your way to face Princess Ahmanet also retain their edge late into the adventure. Health and ammo drops are also spaced rather well to keep you conservative in weapon use but not to the point where you have to slowly make progress with your outmoded submachine gun. The interconnected world you explore does have a few helicopters that can transport you to specific locations if you want to fast travel but they’re spaced out so they’re not helpful to a fault, but there is a rather weak idea to motivate exploration in the form of hidden relics.

 

There are 50 relics hidden throughout the game world and they often do require you to think about how to use abilities well or notice something unusual in the environment, but a brief jumping puzzle being rewarded with a relic is a bit lame once you learn they have no actual purpose. Even a tiny little boost for finding them like a single extra bullet in a gun would at least make this a search that gets more meaningful with time, but instead they are essentially just trophies for doing something a little bit difficult, and even then there’s no way to know which exact ones you’ve grabbed if you’re going for the full set. Making them entirely optional means they aren’t harmful, but there are better rewards elsewhere like health boosts so it can be a disappointment to see a relic instead of a meaningful upgrade.

THE VERDICT: The Mummy Demastered fills its eerie spaces with credible threats both with the normal monsters you face and the tough bosses that demand you understand them before they go down. Progress feels well-earned and the weapons you get powerful but requiring some self-control in order to get the most out of them, and while it’s not too long of an adventure, some hidden extras that help even the odds motivate some interesting extra exploration. Some ideas like fighting your reanimated corpse or the mostly pointless relics don’t shake things up too much in a good or bad way, but there’s still enough to this Metroidvania adventure to make shooting your way through monsters an entertaining time.

 

And so, I give The Mummy Demastered for Nintendo Switch…

A GOOD rating. Besides that earlier mentioned digitized face that obviously is meant to be a real person’s, The Mummy Demastered almost pulls off the image of being an entirely original product, the only other clue perhaps being its short length. There was definitely room for more bosses and monsters if the developers had only the time to make them, but the exploration platforming on show still manages to keep you entertained throughout and the map is both big enough to have unique locations but small enough that it can be quickly traversed and populated with distinct monster types so that each area has a unique feel. You won’t find the bouncing brains and tentacled experiments in the same places as infected dogs or actual mummies, and the mix of tombs where the ancient evil rise from and the modern facilities they’re pushing into gives you a diverse range of spaces to travel through. There certainly could have been more done with expanding your agent’s abilities or arsenal, a double jump for example a better idea than simply making you jump higher, but the game does have a good handle on providing danger throughout in its current form. You may get a flamethrower or grenade that can easily wipe out a few troublesome foes ahead, but the lack of guaranteed ammunition refills being nearby means you watch your actions more closely so that you won’t find yourself running low but also have the incentive to engage many foes because they might just happen to have a good ammo top-off if you kill them. The relics do feel like a missed opportunity since the act of finding them is often an interesting brief trial but the reward doesn’t amount to anything, but perhaps they were designed that way so that you wouldn’t feel compelled to have to scour the whole world thoroughly and can instead keep pushing forward into interesting new locations.

 

Mostly, The Mummy Demastered takes the broad elements of the 2017 film like the Prodigium organization and its villain’s concept and heads off into its own desired direction. This works out in its favor as it charts out its own identity, albeit one that definitely hearkens back to a specific era of gaming due to its artistic direction. Still, it doesn’t feel like it’s just trying to ape predecessors in its genre, the Metroidvania influence strong but The Mummy Demastered finds itself in a nice spot between old school gaming and the elements from a modern film, and by doing so, it can be entertaining in its own right and leave a legacy greater than a simple tie-in or basic genre throwback.