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Published on July 26th, 2024 | by Edward Gosling

Madness Beverage Review (PC)

Sometimes when you dip your pan into the murky waters of the Steam store, you can find a few nuggets of gold. I certainly wasn’t expecting to find games the likes of Rad Rogers or Hylics, but when I took the plunge I most definitely enjoyed them. With the subject of this review, however, this was unfortunately not so. Madness Beverage (possibly one of the dumbest names for a game I’ve ever seen) is a shooter released at the tail end of 2021 by Blue Sunset games, the only shooter in their repertoire, and, well, let us simply say that this one was a disappointment.

I’ll be blunt: Madness Beverage is generic, in every possible way. Take, for instance, the gameplay: You run through incredibly claustrophobic levels, cracking awful one-liners with such frequency that you’d think the player character was being paid by the word, killing generic demons with generic assault rifles, shotguns and rocket launchers which don’t even feel all that fun to use; even the rocket launcher is boring (How on earth do you make a rocket launcher boring?!). There are also drug-infused drinks that give you time-limited special abilities, which are supposed to be the game’s killer mechanic, but not only do they not show up until about an hour in, the game never gives you a tutorial on HOW to use the damn things, not even telling you what button activates them. So what it ends up being is a generic shooter with a gimmick tacked on, which in 2021 is simply not enough.

Speaking of the levels, given that this is meant to be a sci-fi game, all of them seem to be at odds with the game’s actual theming. There’s an old castle level, a crystalline cave level, a lava-filled cave level, and so forth, none of which actually look like they belong in this game – in fact, they look like they’ve been cobbled together with a few free Unity assets. It gives the impression that one half of the team wanted to make one game and the other half wanted to make another, and this was the best compromise they could come up with. As for their designs, aside from being cramped as before stated, they’re also mazelike in the wrong way. I could barely tell where I was going half the time purely because every area in the level I was playing looked exactly the same.

What also doesn’t help is the fact that areas are often gated off by arbitrary locked doors which only open if you kill a certain number of enemies – something the game doesn’t tell you, whilst also causing enemies to trickle towards you at a slow enough rate that it takes ages for these doors to open, in some cases I had to backtrack and kill a couple of enemies earlier on in the level to get the damn thing to open. Other questionable design choices include “secrets” which are left out in the open for all and sundry to see, and at least one instance of a button opening a door… which leads straight to another button, which opens a different door. 

On many levels, Madness Beverage represents a deep, painful regret deep inside my very soul. I regret paying money for this game. I regret playing this game. I regret trying to review it. It’s so generic and so poorly slapped together that it reminds me of some sort of high-school project. If you have never played a shooter game before you your entire life, you might maybe get some enjoyment out of it – but then again you could also get that same enjoyment by buying one of the many, many other cheaper and better FPS games out there. Or perhaps by buying an actual beverage in a bar instead.

[This article was originally written for E1M1 Magazine, republished with permission. https://www.e1m1magazine.com/]

About the Author

Edward Gosling Ed has been playing games since he was in primary school, and now has a Steam library of over 2000 games, only a fraction of which he has actually played!

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