Mega Coin Squad

After completing this one, I tried to find out why I actually bought the damn thing. Was it Games with Gold? No. Was it Easy? No. Was it Cheap? I’ll be honest, I couldn’t be bothered to look back through my payment history to find this out but I’m guessing it’s the only reason I would have paid cash money for it.

Mega Coin Squad sees you take control of... the Mega Coin Squad as they travel to a strange new world to... collect coins. There are five playable characters at the start of the game, each with their own reasons for joining the Mega Coin Squad but this wasn’t obvious from the intros you get and I didn’t really engage with any of them. That said, I don’t think the back story is the main selling point of the game.

The game itself is comprised of a series of three coin-collecting missions followed by a level where you must fight enemies and collect a Mega Coin. This process is repeated four times for one playthrough of the game. The levels themselves are Mario style platforming set pieces where obstacles, enemies and coins phase in and out of existence. You have to collect a set amount of coins and put them in a giant pink piggy bank to complete the level.

Each of the coin collecting levels has three challenges; one for completing it under a set amount of time; another for banking your coin target in one go and another for completing the level without taking any damage. The first two are fine but this last one can suck my dick. The game feels ridiculously unfair at times regarding when enemies hit you and when you can defend yourself and the controls are very sensitive so it’s quite easy to fly into a pit of fire by mistake. My personal favourite example of how unfair the game is occurred when I was standing on a platform above some spikes and the whole thing faded out of existence... but apparently the platform I was standing on faded first so I landed on the now invisible spikes and took damage. As I said. Suck my dick.

Graphically it’s pretty similar to Super Nintendo Mario and this is fine for its purpose but fuck me, the music is annoying. It’s like it’s been designed to be both penetrating and grating at the same time and whatever you do, do not leave the game at the menu and do something else. It’s the kind of shit that horrible neighbours leave on loud and go out for the day. Fast paced, high-pitched and repetitive.

There are some reports of frame rate drops from some of the gaming community but I didn’t experience a lot of this. There were a few times were the game became slightly jittery but not often and I only noticed after I had been playing for a while.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

Of the 22 achievements, you get 10 from completing the main game with the 6 different characters available. You start with 5 but unlock a bonus character after your first run through. In addition to this there are 3 grind ones where you have to bank a total of 100,000 coins. The hardest level requires you to bank 999 coins which gives you a picture of how much grinding is required. You can go in excess of the banking amount though so the easiest way to do this is to replay level 1-3 over and over again maximising your banking each time.

There are 3 achievements associated with completing all the challenges in the game. You have to do this in one level, one world and then in all levels. Getting the challenges for not getting hit is where the majority of my OTT shouting was done – especially if this happens at the end of one of the harder levels.

There are also two timed achievements for completing a level in less than 60 and 30 seconds and this goes hand in hand with the challenges. You get power ups from completing the challenges and these can greatly speed up your level clearances. The double jump is pretty much essential to get early on too. Once you’ve got a few, replay level 1 until you get it down to less than 30 seconds.

The last two achievements are the hard ones and ones that I thought would risk the completion for me. The first of these is for completing the whole game in less than thirty minutes but there is a work around for this. You can quit to dashboard if you die or are too slow so all you really need is patience and persistence for this. I actually did it with one of the slower characters on my second genuine attempt at this.

The last one, I am pretty proud of myself for doing and more so because of the way I did it. You have to complete the entire game in one sitting without dying. I didn’t really try this, I just sat down, turned it on and took it a level at a time. Te key really is patience and if some coins look too hard to get and you only have one life, don’t risk it, just wait for a better opportunity. I was massively surprised to nail this first time, especially because I so rarely do things first time. But I’m not going to sit here and say it was easy. That would ignore all my screams of frustration as I got used to playing the game to a reasonable standard.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Mega Coin Squad is not something I will look back fondly on. The music was grating, the game play was inconsistent and there’s not much variety. I’m still pleased to have completed it though so it does carry a weird sort of satisfaction with me.