
Indie studio KRUMB Games is soon to launch their new action, retro-Shooter Mekkablood: Quarry Assault. The game itself is made by a solo developer and is inspired by the early 90s, FPS games such as Duke Nukem, Doom, and Quake. I enjoy retro-styled shooters, but I can’t lie this mainly piqued my interested due to the Mech aspect of it.
Warning! Please be aware this article contains gifs that may include flashing lights and patterns.
Eat lead… wait, do you eat lead?
Has this game caught your interest? Well good news, it launches on Steam on January 20th! Although I couldn’t say for how much you can Wishlist it today.
Gameplay
Now, when I started Mekkablood, there wasn’t a story. But looking at the Steam page for the game here is the general gist. We play Bill, an ex-Space Farmer who owns a mining company. This eventually gets attacked by a rival called Torxcorp. They end up stealing Bill’s precious Figurines and his girlfriend Beth. Now, Bill heads out in his Mech with Rusty (his friend) on comms. Yeah, the only thing I know is during each level Rusty says some quip at Bill.
Mekkablood plays much like most typical retro-style shooters. Progress through the level, find the key, possibly find a secret, and exit the level. You also familiarly walk over ammo and items. What’s different, however, is having Turbo Boost, which acts as your dash/running, and your cockpit HUD’s and mirrors. The front-left screen on your dashboard shows ammo for your currently held weapon, your health, armour and shield. The screen right of that shows how much of each ammo type you have. You have two mirrors on either side at the very top of your cockpit that show what’s left and right, and on the bottom left is your rear-view mirror, which I think is a neat detail.

Mekkablood graces you with occasional checkpoints, so when you die you can choose the ‘continue’ option from the main menu and pick up from there. Get used to respawning as environmental traps, such as crushing walls, kill you upon impact. I find it odd that when a level ends, there’s no stats screen or rating system, which is a shame. You’re pretty much put straight into the next level. There’s a secret per level, but it just adds figurines to your cockpit.
Graphics & Audio
Mekkablood definitely does well with its retro look. Some of the smaller details I enjoy too, like the junk jostling around the cockpit toward your movement, and similarly so with the pilot’s controls.
That’s about where the novelty ends for me, though. While the colours are vibrant and the aesthetic is there, everything looks too samey. Most of the map designs look like palette swaps of each other, and none of them, as far as I’ve seen, have a distinctive look. One area was a warehouse, but besides a handful of crates, it looked like a generic room like the rest of the levels. At the very least adding a forklift, some catwalks, or something to make it look more like a warehouse would have helped. After a while, the levels just become a blur of saturated colours.

It seems worthy to note here that the Mekkablood: Quarry Assault’s Steam page has an AI content disclosure on it. People have different opinions on the use of AI, particularly within games. I won’t be partaking in these discussions, at least not in this review, but here is what the Steam disclosure says:
“The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this: Dall-E 3 was used to help generate the textures and pixel art, no artist prompts were used, just generic terms. Suno was used for the music.”
Longevity
Unlike other retro-shooters, we don’t get a results board at the end of each level. So there isn’t any real reason for replaying levels, besides finding the figurines hidden around. Presumably there is only one figure in each level, at least this is what I gathered from what the Steam page says.
I didn’t actually get to finish the game because of being soft locked out of the exit on the Warehouse level. I had the keys but the door just wouldn’t open up. Even after restarting the level and playing back up to that point, I still could not progress. For this reason I find it hard to say how long the game will actually take to complete. Or even how replayable it truly is.
Final Thoughts
Gameplay-wise, it’s fun and what you expect of a classic shooter. However, the weapons feel too samey and don’t look to have a difference in damage. My biggest issue is the lack of detail on level design. Most of the time it feels like I’m running through nothing but corridors with little to nothing to do. Mekkablood: Quarry Assault’s levels are very much a maze, and the coloured corridors ended up messing with my eyes.
Updated Final thoughts
I returned to Mekkablood once I was told they had patched the soft lock issue I had. Continuing where I left off, I got to say it still feels empty. The levels are massive but still feel like a maze filled with enemies. When you clear the entire area, it feels awkward and empty heading back, even with the newly coloured key, since nothing really appears.
The mechs themselves don’t really react if you can attack from a specific distance, which ends up making them feel trivial. When reaching the end level (which is sort of so called by the character Rusty, so I assume it’s the last level), I just still wasn’t feeling it. All in all, even with this latest fix, my opinion hasn’t changed.
I feel Mekkablood still deserves the Thumb Culture Bronze Award.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
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Hi Kyle thanks for checking out the game. The warehouse level has 2 keys and I think you didn’t get the second one as nobody else has brought up this issue, and I’ve played through myself many times. Also unfortunately you weren’t able to make it very far into the game. The wall textures are quite a bit different on each level and rarely reused, and not just recolored, but a few are. This is a solo developed game, and I would have liked to have added more random objects to it, but I also wanted to get it done in a reasonable amount of time, and instead focus on making sure the gameplay was a solid experience. The game takes most around 5 hours or so to complete.
Hi Chad,
Thanks for the comment. We’ve been in touch with your publisher and I believe this game play issue has been found with an update pushed through. Our writer Kyle has updated his review to reflect this.
Thanks,
Charlotte
TC Co-Editor
This barely can be called a game. It’s all made with AI, there is only one level being played over and over again for four hours, killing the same 4 types of enemies that behave in the same way. No bosses, nothing.