Mucha Lucha is the best way to waste thirty dollars and kill brain cells at the same time.
In Mucha Lucha, you play as three young Mascaritas (little masked ones)—Rikochet, Buena Girl, and The Flea—each with their own signatures moves and catch phrase!! You will guide them through a wacky adventure in the quest to recover the all-important Code of Masked Wrestling. While in their care, the book was stolen from the main office of the School of Lucha—school that teaches wrestling—and the three main characters must find the book or be expelled! The quest to retrieve the book leads them to bizarre landscapes and to a final encounter with the dreaded El Dolor De Kurtz, the leader of room 207. End sarcasm.
Visuals
Mucha Lucha, if you were unaware, is one of the WB’s latest Saturday morning cartoons. The graphical style in Mucha Lucha was obviously designed to bear a slight resemblance to this cartoon… and it does. Artistically, the game does have a somewhat solid standing, but the overall presentation is quite deficient. Sprites and environments alike are ludicrously ugly and don’t show any amplitude of quality. The animations are also rather laughable. The skill work at hand is equivalent to that of a young child’s first drawing on MS Paint… Yes, it’s that bad.
Audio
Mucha Lucha’s auditory offerings aren’t terribly bad; they’re about average. It’s about what you would expect from any standard Game Boy Advance game. It’s simply just a small gathering of repetitive clips inspired by the cartoon. There’s no variety whatsoever with sound effects. They’re extremely bland. You’ll want to turn your speakers off the majority of the time considering the massive button mashing you’ll be enduring.
Gameplay
It’s hard to believe that any button masher could be as bad as Mucha Lucha. Your character’s puny little kicks and punches do extremely minute damage, and you’ve literally got to pound the A and B buttons for over a minute (in some cases, two or three) depending on the enemy. Your fingers will be numb after fighting four of five out of the twenty plus enemies in a single level. On the bright side, it does offer a good number of wrestling combinations you can utilize. However, considering each of these attacks perform the same amount of damage, it’s completely pointless to bother trying.
For higher hit points, you can throw objects such as trashcans and unconscious enemies or use one of the characters’ signature moves. Each character has a standard signature move in addition to new unlockable ones. The attacks, however, take quite a while to power up (with each kill, you gather some devastation points). When you have a full devastation meter, you can use your signature moves. They’ll kill all regular enemies instantly, and during a boss fight, it will knock at least half of their life away—leaving virtually no challenge, which leads me to the next topic…
The difficulty of Mucha Lucha is so pathetically easy, you’d be ashamed and embarrassed to find yourself in a situation where you died in a fight. There are a lot of trenches and traps, however, which you’ll probably fall in quite a few times, but dying in a fight is really inexcusable. In case you are running low on health, though, there are an abundance of health power-ups dotted around the mindless landscapes. The A.I. of the enemies is very poor. So, even if four or five enemies surround you, you should have no problem at all picking them off one by one. After you've completed the game (if you've actually managed to play that long), you will unlock the other characters. During a second run through Mucha Lucha, you can perform what is the essence of tag-team wrestling by tapping start. They'll switch places, and wha-la: no point!
The game play in Mucha Lucha is just so slow paced, it’s really hard to credit it for any good standings. The fighting might be excusable considering that it didn't take an excess of two minutes to kill each enemy. Unfortuantely, that is not so... Not even haflway through the very first level, any person, despite age, will be completely sick of Mucha Lucha. Match this extremely lacking game play with the terrible story and overall poor quality and you've got one of the worst games of 2003. Congratulations Ubisoft and Digital Eclipse, we salute you!
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