Micetopia
Ninja Rabbit Studio’s Micetopia sees you play as a small mouse named Rich who must venture out to save his people from the forces of evil. All mice in the village have been taken and scattered throughout the nearby cave and forest, and you must fight your way through the enemies to rescue your friends and neighbours.
Done in a metroidvania style, you must travel back and forward to rescue the villagers and become a hero. You are equipped with a sword as well as a bow and arrow, and using these you can wipe out most enemies with relative ease. Using your bow to open up blocked passageways by shooting pressure plates caused us some confusion at first, with many plates seemingly doing nothing. It took longer than I care to admit to realise that this is down to the fact that you can approach a room from more than one angle, meaning you will need a pressure plate on both sides.
The pixel art style of Micetopia is visually appealing, with great use of glowy lighting in the caves from hanging torches and gems, however there’s not a great deal of variation in the actual look of the world. The caves are fairly samey throughout, and the forest segment at the end felt tacked on due to the short amount of time spent there compared to the caves. There also wasn’t really a lot to do within the forest, further emphasising this. Enemy and boss designs are varied, however there aren’t many of them to choose from, with rabbits, frogs, stabby lizards and weird gem-bugs being pretty much the full extent of the basic enemies, and with only a few bosses - it would have been cool to see a wider range. (Spoiler Alert! The game does end on a cliffhanger, opening up the potential for a second game - so maybe they’ll explore this more, then). There’s a couple of catchy tunes that will play throughout, but nothing spectacular - this too could have done with a bit more variety to spice things up a bit.
The in-game map is accessible at any time, and is colour-coded which is super helpful, as the metroidvania style combined with the fairly samey appearance of most areas can be a tad confusing at times. At a glance, you can quickly see where various rooms are, with yellow rooms including villagers that need rescued; green rooms, to warp back to the main village; and purple rooms, that include secret warps.
We did run into one strange bug whilst playing, and that was for rescuing Aunt Rose - instead of being where she was meant to be for her rescue, she was already back in the village after another character was returned. Searching online and via Twitter to see if there was a fix planned for this resulted in us finding an acknowledgement on Ratalaika’s official Twitter page. It seems to be an issue that just occurs at random, as some players are affected and others not - but there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for it. I’m not 100% sure if the patch is live yet or not, but after playing through a few times Aunt Rose was finally where she needed to be, so whether that is a result of good luck or the patch - we don’t know.
Available for £4.99 on the Xbox Store, it’s nice and cheap for what it is. There’s not a whole lot of replayability, as everything is the same throughout runs, but in our case at least we had to replay multiple times in order to get the final achievement - and doing so made it feel much more tedious with each run. If you can manage to get through the game in a single run it feels much better and whilst there’s a lot of grinding required to get all of the gems needed for all upgrades - this doesn’t take too long, especially if you find a good spot next to a warp and just rinse and repeat. This is more of a “wanting to get everything” aspect, rather than a necessity, as completing the game without them isn’t hard at all, so it feels like they are a bit of a wasted opportunity. It was still a fun game, despite the issues we had with Aunt Rose, and we’re looking forward to what’s in store for the potential sequel.
In the end, we decided to give Micetopia the Collecting Asylum rating of 6.5/10.
Have you played Micetopia yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Ratalaika for the Micetopia Xbox One review code!
