It's quiet... too quiet.

Mugsters has some slick and action-packed trailers (as seen on its Steam page). Sadly, the game itself is ... fairly different.

There's no introduction, cinematic or otherwise. There's no in-game storytelling except what's implied by the existence of teleporters and loud machines. There isn't even any background music!

Although the game doesn't tutorialize its controls at all, there's not much to learn: jump, run, pick-up, punch/throw. The lack of available player actions is apparent from the very first level -- a human is trapped in a glass tube, so, how do you free it? There are no interactive elements, and punches don't work... guess you'll need to pick up and throw something at it.

Its physics sandbox is pretty much all that Mugsters has going for it, and gameplay leans hard on this: throw explosive barrels at this thing, jump a car over a ramp, et cetera. And yet, there isn't much to do in the game's sandbox, other than lower barriers and destroy walls until you reach the end of the level.

As nice as the tilt-shift perspective and "clean" un-textured art style look, these become liabilities during actual gameplay: obstacles frequently obscure your immediate surroundings (prepare for lots of camera rotation) and ground elevation changes are difficult to read.

And although Mugsters can be played co-operatively, the appeal of a multiplayer sandbox is brought low by the auto-zooming shared camera. Your player avatar is already tiny when flying solo; a second player just zooms out even further, and can make the level quite inscrutable.

If you really, really want to play around in a fairly-sparse physics sandbox with vehicles, then Mugsters offers several levels' worth of that. But the game is otherwise outstandingly barren.

Better than: Cubots: The Origins
Not as good as: Zoo Rampage
For a better vehicle sandbox, consider revisiting: Blast Corps

Progress: got to island 7