Mythbusters: The Game Preview

I love the show Mythbusters, so this videogame version of the show from Playway and Movie Games seemed like something I’d really get into. The recent Steam Next Fest event gave us a demo of the game in order to allow us to recreate all those great moments from the show. Remember that time they cut some wood? Then that other time they cut some wood? What about when they played that mini game that involved clicking on a random shape to fill it up to a random percentage? Yes, Mythbusters: the Game takes all the elements that made the TV show so popular, bundles them into one neat package, then throws that package right in the bin. 

This is a licence with lots of potential but how it has been realised is so far incredibly disappointing. This is just a preview of course, so there’s plenty of time for things to be turned around, but let’s take a quick look at what is in place so far in Mythbusters: The Game and why I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped I would.

You'd be forgiven for thinking this is me trying to bust the myth that tyres need to be round and remain above ground level.

You will spend most of your time in this title in the workshop. This isn’t a particularly accurate representation of the workshop from the show, and could well be the workshop in any of the developer’s other simulation games. You’re given a myth to bust and a set of blueprints to make machinery to bust it with. Then you need to assemble your notebook, which is done by playing a series of very simple minigames. There’s one that’s a tiny version of Pipe Mania, one that involves bouncing a ball so it hits different targets, and one that asks you to shade in a geometric shape to a random percentage. None of these things are in the show, and none of them are particularly fun: they just feel like things that have been put in to make it feel more like a game.

After the tedium of the blueprint stage, your notebook will be assembled with the steps you need to follow to create the experiment. This involves wandering around the storeroom to collect the things you need, then assembling them on various worktops. You’ll usually have a bunch of wood to cut up and a decent amount of nailing to do. These all take the forms of various clicking on set points and again, they’re not particularly fun. There’s only one way to make anything so there’s no scope for creative flair, just keep clicking on what you’re told until it’s not there.

The Pipe Mania style mini game was about the only semblance of fun I had, but I've been able to play that since 1989 in various forms already.

Eventually, you will complete the build and it’s time to put things in the van. Yes, this game actually goes to the effort of simulating loading a vehicle to go to your test site! When you are at the test site, you have to put the objects exactly where you’re told, press a couple of buttons and the myth is usually busted in just a few short seconds. Again, there’s no scope for personalisation or any sort of trial and error, you just do what the developer has already decided will happen, then you put things back in the van and return to the workshop to assemble an episode.

Oh and did I mention you’re doing most of this in near silence as the game has no background music at the moment? There’s just an ethereal hum like the intro to a Pink Floyd song that never actually starts. The main menu has music, if you can call it that, but it’s a few bars of looped guitar and it stops as soon as you start the game anyway.

I had thought that maybe the episode assembly would bring more to the game, but it doesn’t. You have a set number of minutes to fill up and a selection of clips to choose from, each of which will affect your viewer numbers in some way. You can’t view any of these clips, you just have a still image representing them and a textual description. Once you’ve created the show you like, you click on a button and everything closes. I thought I had done something wrong initially but it turns out that’s really it. There’s no interaction, clips, or anything other than “yup, you made a show. Now go do another experiment”.

You can't watch the show, or even see a little clip of it, you just assemble and move on. It's largely pointless, much like the rest of the game so far.

The magic of Mythbusters has always been in experimentation. What grips us is Jamie and testing out theories and coming up with wacky ideas that don’t work until they find the right one or exhaust their ideas and have to declare the myth as busted. It’s not in the minutiae of assembling craft and placing objects. If all the experiments and their outcomes were pre-determined and there was no scope for chaos at all then I don’t think the show would have made it past the pilot. I really want the developers to turn this around and come up with a formula that is more in keeping with it’s televisual counterpart as I genuinely feel there’s scope for a great game here. If they can’t, then I will probably be giving this one a myth as it’s just too busted to be worth playing in its current state.