Mucha Lucha: Mascaritas of the Lost Code Review

Mucha Lucha is a GBA game based off of the KWB cartoon series. If you are wondering, the network isn’t Kyle W. Bell, it is Kids Warner Bros. The cartoon is based off of masked Mexican wrestlers, definitely a bit quirky, but what cartoons are not these days. In Mucha Lucha, you must find your wrestling school’s “Code of Masked Wrestling� or else face expulsion.

You play as the three main characters from the show; Rikochet, Buena Girl, and The Flea over the game’s 16 levels. The levels are broken up into four different sub-groups, where you play three regular beat-em-up levels and then one boss fight at the end. The game suffers from overly simplistic controls; punch, kick, jump, throw, and combos (e.g. jump-kick). Ubi Soft claims that fifteen different moves are available. That might be true, if you consider you can move your character up, down, left, and right, along with the other moves, so yeah, technical there might be 15 “moves�; please notice my sarcasm.

Each character has their own special move, performed by pressing the punch and kick buttons simultaneously. This move wipes essentially every enemy off of the screen. Despite high hit counts, enemies are simple to kill. Usually knocking them into a corner, then hitting them multiple times is all that is needed to be done to kill them. Most enemies avoid you as it is, but the scant variety makes things worse.

Even though bosses aren’t difficult, they are probably the lone fascination in the entire game. I find it interesting that a regular stooge can take about as many hits as the bosses, at least some of them. Another peculiar tidbit is that I noticed that I had an easier time, and took less damage, fighting the bosses, than fighting the regular baddies. Honestly though, the boss fights are fun and the only diversion from the normal jump-kick and punch sequences found in every level.

Mucha Lucha’s length and difficult both pale in comparison to other GBA titles. I beat the game in less than two hours with minimal difficulty. The only time that your character will die, is when it is accidental. Death almost only comes on account of falling through a crack, not by enemy blows. In the end, I tried to enjoy myself and actually did for a while, but then, thankfully, the game ended shortly after an hour of gameplay. I would actually look forward to a sequel, if some gameplay variety would be inserted.