Namco’s Muscle March Review for the Nintendo Wii

Those of you unfamiliar with ‘Muscle March’, or many of Namco’s recent publications, may experience some difficulty following this article. Fact: I am writing this article completely sober.

The game opens with a number of extremely muscle bound men and a woman—all of which are wearing nothing more than thongs (Arnold Schwarznegger Mr. Universe circa late 1960s)—are hanging out with their polar bear friend from Norway when they observe a robbery taking place. So, these strong, do-gooders decide to chase the culprit through which ever setting you choose. In the country side I found it was a small demon that stole the cookie jar.

The chase gets underway after a loading screen and all of the characters line up behind the imp with the stolen goods. As the imp and your team near a stone wall, he makes a pose of someone flexing their biceps. He breaks down the wall and leaves his muscular silhouette. Each of you runs through that hole in the same pose in order to keep up.

A few buildings go by and WHAM! A banana peel. The guy in the front of the line slips out and the pace picks up. You speed through a few more silhouettes and another victim is claimed by the imp’s banana peels. Each time a character slips out of the chase, the speed increases.

Eventually, you are the only chaser in line and you’re hot on the bad guy’s tale. When you get close enough, the game prompts you to shake your controllers up and down in a sprinting motion. If you manage to do this quick enough without suffering the embarrassment of flailing your arms like an idiot at your TV, a speedometer blazes up to 110 km/h and you tackle the thief. Then all of your nearly naked and oiled friends and polar bear join in on the pile.

BUT WAIT! The jar, it has escaped into the hands of another thief, an alien…So, this next stage is faster than the first and increases with each runner lost again. General difficulty increase. You catch the alien and move onto the third and final stage of level one to try and take down a silver surfer looking guy.

Here’s where my only complaint comes in: I can’t catch him. I don’t know if my technique is wrong for shaking the Wii-mote and nunchuck or what. Yes, this is categorized as a work out game, but by no means am I in poor shape! I can run three miles under 25 minutes and can bench my body weight last time I checked. Granted, that’s been at least a couple of months, but level one! Very disheartening. The pose seems to want to move at the slightest motion of the Wii-mote; but, not necessarily in the position you want it in. Aside from these control glitches, the player’s reaction time has to be spot on. Five HP goes by much quicker than expected.

The artwork on the game is hilarious. While running through the streets, you encounter hundreds of bizarre scenes and images. This game has taken the humor of the internet age and made it into something slightly more appropriate than 4chan. The closest thing I can relate this game to is Katamari Damacy. Katamari doesn’t feature nearly naked men (except for maybe the King’s tights), and it has nothing to do with making muscular poses; but, Katamari is just as simple, equally strange, and they are both definitely fun.

Muscle March is $5 to download onto the Wii and is totally worth it. Even if you just want to show your friends one of the strangest games they’ll have ever seen. Breaking ‘Muscle March’ down by category is easy—graphics are on par with a standard arcade game you’d find in the mall, not its strong point but totally works for the game; the sound design is awesome, comes at you fast and odd with musical choices paired with the sound effects themselves; story is too strange to analyze, you’ll love the absurdism or simply disregard it; game play is really fun, but difficult and sort of glitchy. There may be some finesse to making those sprints work that I haven’t figured out yet. Replay value has got to be there because I’ve been playing just the first level for about a week now. Overall, this is a great way to spend five bucks.

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Tagged as: muscle march, namco, Review, Wii