If pretty good developers can often do a bit of everything, brilliant developers – particularly brilliant indie developers – tend to do one single thing extremely well. As studios go, PomPom Games is a case in point. Happy to tinker endlessly with the sparking genome that made Eugene Jarvis’ early coin-op output so fresh, the two-man team has always specialised in pared-down blasting mechanics wedded to a cheerily gynaecological art style. Squeamish, gloopy and otherworldly, PomPom’s offerings come across as flying visits for the most part: an energetic buzz over the landscape followed by the briefest of touchdowns to encounter – and generally obliterate – some of the volatile native wildlife, before it’s time to zip right back out again, head spinning, ears ringing and stomach churning.
Mutant Storm Empire was always going to be different. Following Mutant Storm Reloaded’s successful ported debut in the early days of the Xbox Live Arcade service, Empire was planned as something much bolder than another colourful reworking of Robotron: 2084 or Defender. It was to be a small game made large. It was to be an arcade epic built from brisk strokes, huge environments and dozens of bosses – each one stranger, dribblier and more inventive than the last. If PomPom’s previous titles had been day trips to single, fascinating Galápagos islands, then, this was conceived as a breathless rush across the entire archipelago. There was only one question: how would a team that specialised in tiny, detailed experiences find a way to put its stamp on such a giant undertaking?
Not through mechanical invention, certainly. Twin-stick shooters tend to be the most fiercely specific of genres, and PomPom’s peculiar skill has always been in refining the basic elements rather than offering any interesting variations on them. Like Reloaded, Empire would still be built around the simple business of strafing and shooting, offering clean, clear-headed controls in order to provide the perfect contrast to the slimy enemies spawning in ugly clusters or roaming about in grumpy, tussling herds. Smart bombs and bosses would mix things up occasionally, but – barring a new combo system that saw you chaining together kills of specific enemy types to keep your score heading upwards in exponential bursts – there would be few technical intricacies to elevate the developer’s latest from its impressive back catalogue – or, in fact, from the rest of the dual-thumbstick crowd.
PomPom didn’t plan to throw in any new narrative tricks, either. As was fast becoming the studio’s standard approach, Empire’s huge unspooling worlds and snarling, skittering, clanking beasts are explained away with a short, thrifty paragraph of jokey and bombastic non-specifics – a paragraph that trails off quickly in a typically self-deprecating manner. While there would be a supreme boss lurking at the end of the final level, your reasons for killing it would probably be limited to the fact that, like everything else you’d killed in order to get to it, it was too creatively disgusting to live. PomPom’s sickly, regurgitated art direction has always provided the best kind of motivation for the endless carnage that tends to erupt in its games, anyway – deeper levels of justification are superfluous.
Instead, the developer smartly chose to zero in on its core skill: inventive, disturbing (and yet oddly endearing) visual design. Faced with a much broader canvas, the flimsy solo chambers of Reloaded begin to reach out and branch. Their walls turn from slippery neon gelatin to barriers of rock or steel, while iron floors studded with rivets and bolts warp slickly into focus underneath them. Single rooms become first clusters, then chains and finally genuine corridors: intricate spaces bristling with ancient engineering, snug battle arenas and sneaky monster closets. There are pistons and spinning gears lurking in the darkness now. There are unappetising water features.
Far more dazzling than the shift in architectural ambition, however, is the increased scope of the game’s uniformly hideous cast. The original Mutant Storm may have given players the questionable delights of prolonged encounters with the shimmering Sperm Flower, whose taut, drum-like skin and wispy, trailing tails swim through so many sweaty arcade nightmares, or thrown them up against ranks of those punkish little Jelly Baby homunculi, covered in spikes that might be jewellery or simply pieces of their pink and green hides, but Empire chose to ramp things up considerably. Half an hour’s introductory shooting would see you facing off against vast, toothless fish, riddled with electrified breeding sacs, against blind vacuum-cleaner-nosed lumps of invertebrate flesh with mud-spewing boils, and against legions of vampiric frogspawn, itching to swarm together into frantic bait balls and tear you to pieces. Best of all, with that flailing tendril and sheeny, bulbous surface, your own avatar was hardly less disgusting than most of the enemies you blasted apart.
Taken as a whole, then, Empire’s nothing less than a dark and enjoyable horrifically mutated safari, a kind of midnight Pokémon game, where the fun isn’t just in the killing, but often in the mere sighting of a new enemy. The expanded locations, shifting from the disco urethras and pulsating intestines of the original to include cog-speckled spaceship interiors and now-dusty, ancient sea beds, allow for a wider sweep of wildlife, too, as ghastly things riddled with turrets take their places in line alongside ghastly things riddled with gills, and robot centipedes with glowing Mickey Mouse ears crawl around between clamp-jawed metal monkeys and doll-faced mechanical cat-bots. And all the while, PomPom’s singular flair isn’t just that it can call up such monsters at will, as anyone with a Wacom tablet and a copy of Maya can create endless armies of grotesques after a week of tinkering. It’s that – somehow – with the finer detailing, the studio manages to make these horrors slyly palatable at the same time.
The deeper you travel into Empire, the wavering line between environmental hazard and aborted biological horror becomes increasingly brittle. Corridors fill with murderous red bubbles, laser beams carve arenas into little pockets of death, and around each corner lurks a pelting from intestinal boulders, or oozing lakes of radioactive acid. Tying everything together, however, even when the game’s grim invention threatens to pull it to pieces, is that simple combo system at the heart of it all: a basic, almost primitive, play mechanic that quickly becomes irresistible as you try to collect every dripping scalp the adventure has to offer you. PomPom isn’t just nudging you towards high scores to wring greater strategic depths from its simple kill zones – although it turns out that they are there for the taking – it’s prompting you to explore the entire breadth of Mutant Storm’s world with sharp eyes, and to kill the innumerable queasy wonders within.
Simple to play and yet grotesquely intricate to explore, PomPom’s most elaborate game was also to be its greatest sales disappointment. Launched – on Halloween itself, as it happens – on an Xbox Live Arcade platform that was already moving in new directions, inching up the file size cap as it reached out towards grander, smirkier games, Mutant Storm Empire was crushed between franchise offshoots, slick vertical slices, puzzle ports and Doritos-powered ad tie-ins. Forever empty, the Downloadable Content tab on its start screen proves that menu options really can inspire pathos, and the game itself, in a morbidly appropriate fashion, survives as a hint at the direction in which Microsoft’s platform chose not to evolve: a lone, discarded rock pool, still bubbling with useless, viable life.
PomPom Games, meanwhile, chose to swim outwards towards the smaller platforms, with the likes of ghoulish iPhone puzzlers such as Poppi, and Alien Zombie Death, a blisteringly violent PSP mini, bringing the duo’s blend of dark, wayward biological fantasy and arcadey mechanics to whichever ecosystem would support it most naturally. Empire, however, derelict and mostly unplayed, remains both its strangest and most complete monument to date. It’s a big game and a lavish one, fizzing still with dozens of fierce little ideas.
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