‘Mullet Madjack’ Is The Best Thing On Xbox Game Pass Right Now

Is there such a thing as a pleasant headache? Apparently, such a thing exists: playing Mullet Madjack on Xbox Game Pass for just half an hour instills a strangely delightful pain between your eyes that makes your brain tell you to stop, but you just can’t put it down.

Mullet Madjack is a roguelike first-person shooter from Hammer95 Studios and Epopeia Games, which finally landed on Xbox One, Series X/S, and Cloud Gaming after its initial release on PC last May. It’s a curious and neon-soaked mix of Duke Nukem, Hotline Miami, Post Void, Superhot, and Void Bastards, playing out through the lens of an over-the-top, satirical capitalist dystopia found in The Running Man and its gaming stablemate Smash TV.

It’s also utterly fantastic — and one of the most satisfying games that’s landed on the service in the last few months.

You assume the role of the titular Mullet Madjack, a snarling, hyper-masculine gunman who’s tasked to become a so-called Moderator by a delightfully chipper executive at the Orwellian-named Peace Corp. You need to rescue a virginal princess — and prime social media influencer with billions of followers — from “Robobillionaires” that infest an 80-story tower block. They’re supported by robots in a range of murderous flavors, though all share a consistent look: a cross between the aliens from They Live and the skinless Colossus from Attack on Titan. It’s your job to terminate every single one of them.

Mullet Madjack has a nice twist. In the interests of the audience — viewing your battles through a bloodthirsty and nightmarish version of Twitch — you’re only given ten seconds to live, and the only way to top up this constant countdown is to kill enemies with speed and impunity, in increasingly gruesome ways, as you hurtle towards the exit doors of each stage.

Each floor averages just over one minute, but it feels so much quicker as you punt robots into extractor fans and electrical outlets, chop baddies in half with thrown katanas, blow gunmen up by shooting fire extinguishers, and split their heads open with machetes, claw hammers, and even anime comics. It’s all OK because they ain’t got no souls.

As you progress, new hazards, abilities, and enemies pop up, but it’s paced so well that these new additions simply become part of the fabric. Your one-minute runs may instead play out over 75 seconds, thanks to the inclusion of wall running, laser beams, spinning fans, and lava floors, but you adapt and survive while kicking the life out of anything that moves.

During each set of ten levels, you upgrade your abilities at the end of each floor, adding buffs and bonuses that match your playing style. At the end of each deck, you take on a boss; defeating them gives you a checkpoint, which also resets everything you’ve collected apart from your weapon. If you die, and presuming you’re not playing Mullet Madjack on its insane Permadeath mode, you’re sent back to the nearest checkpoint.

Whatever your playstyle and whichever difficulty level you choose, Mullet Madjack is one of the most satisfying arcade-style FPS games in recent memory. Chaining together kills can feel effortless. You feel all-powerful and don’t question just how far you can fire someone’s dead body after murdering them with a heavy door kick. Even when you’re struggling to make up lost time, you always feel like you’ve got skin in the game — you’ll regularly cling onto life with milliseconds left, and the endorphin rush is joyous.

There’s even a deeper story among all the madness involving your Peace Corp handler; a mid-run sequence involving a Tamagotchi and broken memories of your real life (or is it?); and a psychopathic robot’s desire to use virgin blood to make contact with every possible god or demon. None of this is fluff, but it also doesn’t really matter if you’re not that bothered.

Still, Mullet Madjack isn’t without its foibles. At the time of publishing, Quick Resume doesn’t really work; picking the game up again after a break (which you’ll really need to do every now and then) sees the game consistently crash within the first few moments. There are also occasional vertical glitches that can trap you in the ceiling for a few seconds before you eventually wriggle free.

Most frustratingly, Mullet Madjack shares the same affliction of classic Japanese fighting games like Virtua Fighter and Samurai Shodown: you can be consistently strong and brilliant through the bulk of the game, only to hit a massive brick wall with the final boss. Part of this is because the game suits its largely one-directional corridor shooting — it’s not really designed for standard, open-world FPS rules — but the last battle is so demanding and indiscriminately unfair during certain attempts, and some of the game’s weapons are barely suited to take on the threat, unless you’re in it for the long-haul, which goes against its fast-paced nature.

All in all, Mullet Madjack almost seems to be based on the vision of violent video games held by the anti-gaming lobby during the 1990s — the sort of parents and legislators who thought every game was Doom and blamed developers for any and every evil thing committed by a youngster. It knows this, too — the first achievement I got was for shooting someone in the bollocks, and doing so gives you a time bonus that’s just as valuable as a headshot — but Mullet Madjack is self-aware and proud of its anarchic stupidity, which showcases a wit as quick as its combat.

If you’re struggling to find something to play over a weekend, or so overwhelmed by choice on Xbox Game Pass or your own collection of unplayed titles, give Mullet Madjack a go. You won’t regret it, even if your inevitable headache may imply otherwise.