I feel I need to learn not to underestimate a genre just because of its sheer market saturation. Right at the beginning of the year, I was complaining about the excessive amount of roguelikes out in the market, and how they weren’t pushing the genre or the industry forward in any meaningful way. The result of my incredible short-sightedness? Balatro dropped like a nuke, Dicefolk proved that deckbuilders still had potential, Hades II surpassed all expectations… and now we have Mullet MadJack, a phenomenal breath of fresh air combined anime visuals, neon imagery, first-person shooting, synthwave, and roguelike elements. Put all of those ingredients in a bowl, heat them up, and you end up getting one of the best surprises of the year as a result.

In Mullet MadJack, you play as an amalgamation of every cool action hero from the early 90s, held together by a glorious mullet. He is a bounty hunter of sorts, on his way to rescue a damsel in distress from an evil organization in a gigantic, ever-changing building. The catch is that his efforts are being televised by a streamer, and his heart will stop if he doesn’t amass enough adrenaline whilst doing his job. If you don’t constantly crank yourself up every ten seconds, you die. You do that by killing enemies. Loads and loads of enemies. So many of them.

Ammo is infinite. You run around like a cheetah on Red Bull. Levels are short, meaning you can blast through every single enemy’s guts and reach the end goal of a floor in a couple dozen seconds. Upon learning how to use the game’s many momentum-based techniques (dash, flying kick, slide), you can beat a level with your eyes closed. It also helps out mitigate the somewhat repetitive environments, as you will barely be able to pay attention to them in the first place. Oddly enough, it’s even more fun in lower difficulties, as you end up feeling like an ungodly, unstoppable death machine.

There’s also layers to this entire premise. Sure, at its core, it’s an overcaffeinated first-person shooter roguelike with a lot of style and violence, but you can’t help but love its perfect blend of anime visuals and first-person perspectives, its synthwave-heavy soundtrack, intentionally cheesy voice acting, and its slight jabs at corporativism and our modern, ADHD-infused society. I wouldn’t say these themes make the game stand out, as this is arcade-heavy and can be perfectly enjoyed as a dumb fun pasttime, but it did make it feel more polished and well-planned than most of its peers. Take notes, Post Void.

What else can I even say about it? To be honest, there wasn’t a lot I didn’t like about Mullet MadJack. Environments were incredibly repetitive (themes only change every ten floors), there were one or two sound glitches, and I didn’t exactly find many weapons that were as good as my initial pistol. I just keep using the initial gun because nothing else felt as balanced (whilst still packing one hell of a punch) as it. And when this is the kind of stuf I’m mentioning, you know I’m looking for nitpicks on the bottom of the barrel.

Awesome. This is Mullet MadJack in a nutshell. It could have easily been just another first-person shooter with a neat visual gimmick, but its developers went above and beyond with a lot of style and a fantastic gameplay loop, which is equally enjoyable in either Easy or Hard difficulties, for completely different reasons. It doesn’t matter if you just want to feel overpowered against an army of robots, or if you’re looking for a challenge: Mullet MadJack delivers in spades. This one is an absolute must-have, and one of the most delightful hidden gems of the year so far.

Graphics: 8.0 The blend of old-school anime and cyberpunk is amazing, but the environments are beyond repetitive.	Gameplay: 9.5 The gameplay is downright amazing. It’s so fast-paced, it’s almost hard to pay attention to what’s happening onscreen, but that’s part of its appeal. It’s a neat mixture of bullet hells, first-person shooters, and roguelikes. It’s also oddly more entertaining on lower difficulties, because of how stupidly overpowered you can become.
Sound: 8.0 Very rarely will the one-liners bother you, as the loud synthwave music is clearly the focus of the game’s sound design. The occasional lines of voice acting uttered in between levels is quite good.	Fun Factor: 9.5 The kind of ultra-loud idiocy I love. It’s bombastic, fast-paced, and incredibly cathartic. Even if each level lasts for a mere 50 seconds at best, and you can beat it in less than two hours, this is so engrossing and addictive you can’t help but want to play it over and over again.
Final Verdict: 9.0

Mullet MadJack is available now on (PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.

A copy of Mullet MadJack was provided by the publisher.