MDK Review

Shiny Entertainment first made a name for itself with polished 2D platformers based on Disney hits like Aladdin (the one with the sword) and The Jungle Book. Their big break came with the quirky, surreal Earthworm Jim games, which cemented their playful style. By the mid-90s, though, they were ready to shed the cartoon image and get dark. At the same time, the industry was racing toward 3D graphics. With a tight-knit team and minimal early oversight from their publisher, they had room to experiment and infuse a sharp edge of black humour. Out of that freedom came MDK; a bold pivot into gritty sci-fi action that let Shiny embrace new tech and stake a claim in gaming’s more mature era. From cartoony platformers to edgy shooters, did Shiny’s gamble pay off after all these years? How does it hold up 30 years later?

MDK comes from an era when gamers often dove into a game without being given the full context of what it was about. Sometimes there’s a wall of text giving a quick rundown of the stakes, but more often, players had to consult the manual for any explanation. MDK falls into the latter category, and it’s especially bare-bones given its surreal, gritty aesthetic.

The story centres on a mad scientist who equips his janitor, Kurt Hectic, with a high-tech “Coil Suit” that turns him into a one-man army. His mission: to stop an alien invasion led by Gunter Glut, who commands massive, city-sized machines called Minecrawlers. These colossal fortresses roam the planet, stripping it of minerals and resources while crushing cities, armies, and anything else in their way. The invasion is essentially a massive mining operation, with Earth treated as nothing more than a convenient resource pit like in those Avatar movies.

Without a manual or prior experience with the sequel, most, if not all, of the background surrounding the characters is not present in MDK‘s core game. As far as the player knows, there’s an alien invasion, and there’s a guy in a black suit with a pterodactyl-like mask who’s got a lot of guts and bullets. As the game’s title implies, Kurt has to shoot anything and everything that moves and make it murdered, dead, and killed to death. The story doesn’t really matter much; the game treats its premise like a joke, with the Doc just shrugging and sighing an incredulous “Oh well” if players fail to clear stages quickly enough and the Minecrawlers end up destroying the cities. This kind of dismissiveness toward any conventional plot or narrative ends up making MDK even more funny.

There isn’t anything that looks like MDK, not even its sequel. The visual design combined technical ambition with deliberate surrealism, setting it sharply apart from the dominant first-person shooters of 1997. While Doom, Quake, and their imitators favoured gritty, brown-toned, cathedral-like arenas in first-person, MDK takes a different approach as a third-person shooter and 3D platformer, featuring vast open arenas and ever-changing visual styles. Every level feels like it was handled by a different designer, producing a relentless parade of environments: metallic industrial interiors, psychedelic mirrored chambers, snowy arenas, and even cartoonish sets whose painted walls could be toppled.

Kurt Hectic was primarily a detailed pre-rendered 2D sprite navigating fully polygonal worlds. This efficient mix maintained smooth motion-captured animation, while the skydiving and snowboarding levels render him entirely in 3D. His slick suit has an oily look to it, making him resemble some kind of Giger-esque superhero with vaguely sexual undertones. The environments sway between biomechanical cyber nightmare and something out of a Chuck Jonesian cartoon where a cat chases a mouse… only it’s a guy in a weird xenomorph cosplay chasing cyborg greys.

At its core, MDK is a third-person run-and-gun action game that blends relentless combat with light platforming and inventive set pieces. Like most 3D shooters of its era, it’s fast, reactive, and emphasises mobility over accuracy. Each of its levels begins with an atmospheric free-fall from the orbiting Jim Dandy space station onto a Minecrawler. Once on the surface, Kurt explores a gauntlet of open arenas connected by tunnels. These connecting sections sometimes turn into mini-games such as high-speed sliding or surfing sequences. The core objective is to blast through swaths of enemies, destroy spawn generators that continually produce reinforcements, solve simple environmental puzzles, and ultimately reach and eliminate the Minecrawler’s boss.

Shooting feels deliberately arcade-oriented and satisfying in two distinct modes. In normal third-person view, Kurt’s arm-mounted chaingun has unlimited ammunition and delivers a steady stream of fire. Aiming is relatively forgiving; success depends more on positioning, circle-strafing, and never stopping movement than on pixel-perfect precision, making every battle feel exciting. Enemies can be shredded quickly, and individual limbs or heads can be shot off for gory effect.

MDK’s biggest claim to fame is Kurt’s sniper helmet. When activated, the view shifts to first-person, the camera zooms in dramatically to extreme magnification, and Kurt becomes mostly stationary except for slow, careful strafing. Back in 1997, sniping was a rare feature in shooters, and even today, the helmet’s incredible range remains unmatched. Sniping isn’t all head-shotting noods; sometimes Kurt gets specialised ammunition such as homing missiles and high-arcing mortars, and includes a bullet-cam that follows each shot’s trajectory. Sometimes these are used for light puzzle solving between the harrowing bouts of war between arenas. It’s a welcome break that adds contrast and builds a rhythmic flow, mixing frantic close-quarters spraying with tense, stationary precision shots to take out distant threats or hit switches.

Players can expect different experiences when comparing the PlayStation and PC versions. Overall, both versions are pretty much the same, but the PC version runs at a steady capped 30fps, features MIDI music, and offers more detailed graphical effects and explosions. On PlayStation, MDK runs at an uncapped 60fps but rarely holds that mark. The frame rate jumps all over and gets choppy during most battles, yet it’s never enough to ruin the fun. Thankfully, the PlayStation version’s music is superior thanks to Tommy Tallarico Studios, which completely redid the soundtrack to offer an orchestral experience.

The analogue PlayStation controller is compatible, making it easier to pick up and play too. Although a notable drawback of the PlayStation version is that Kurt is missing many frames of animation, and the snowboarding sections are significantly shorter. There is no perfect version of MDK. Both the PC and PlayStation iterations have their strengths and weaknesses, but there is no doubt that the PlayStation version is more accessible and easier to play. The biggest challenge with the PC version is that it doesn’t initially work well with modern operating systems and might require some extra effort to get it running properly.

Thankfully, physical copies of MDK for PlayStation are quite affordable, with Japanese versions being even cheaper. Since the game has little story beyond the utterly bizarrely Lynchian French music video at the end, it easily transcends language barriers regardless of which regional copy is picked up. It would be nice if Nightdive Studios got their hands on this and gave it their patented spit-shine (along with the pretty good sequel), because MDK is still a righteous and stylish action game that delivers thrills that haven’t been replicated.