Is that a dog with four arms or four...

The gameplay in MDK2 is highly reminiscent of the original, however there is an obvious concentration on action over skill and simple, yet clever puzzle solving that inhabited the original. In the previous game you'd only have to walk a few feet before the next puzzle presented itself, in fact the entire game was based around simple puzzles that involved explosives and shooting.

This seems somewhat lost on the new incarnation, which presents itself more as a comic book style shooter than on requiring thought. Puzzles do inhabit the world, they simply don't blend in with the flow of gameplay as they used to. Still, this is only a minor flaw and something that would have been very difficult to recreate anyway. As such the game hasn't lost much and prefers to concentrate on other areas, not least the characters.

Each character in the game has a unique skill, the main character 'Kurt' (human) as the ability to glide through air, shoot various machine gun types and snipe like some of the best Quakers. Then there's the dog, he has four arms, each of which can be individually equipped with a selection of weaponry picked up as the level plays through; his skill is the ability to blow everything up with insane firepower and use a rocket pack to fly.

Finally we have the professor, a mad scientist that has easily the most confusing and silly style of attacks ever seen in a game this side of the galaxy. He has two hands, each can pickup various objects and items in the game, your job is to combine them and make weaponry or useful tools. A clever idea, yet sadly one of the games few failings as the cross in gameplay styles is rather difficult to adapt into. Who wants to shoot electromagnetic pieces of toast out of a toaster, that isn't a weapon! Is it?

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