State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem
Developer: Lapovich
Reviewed on Nintendo Switch
I remember as a sixth grader I would doodle all over my notebook in class when I was bored. Sometimes my notebook pages contained monsters, aliens, and ghosts, that were attacking superheroes that I would come up with. State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem brings some of my doodling memories to my Nintendo Switch but like my doodles, Master of Mayhem can only do so much.
Master of Mayhem is a twin stick shooter with RPG mechanics that are suited to fit your play-style. The game is simply fun, every 
level that you beat, and there are 48 stages in this game, gives you either a new primary or secondary gun, so every stage plays differently. In one of my playthroughs I was running around town shooting my enemies with a shotgun , but the next level I was running around shooting enemies with a blade gun. The first couple of stages can be pretty easy, and it made me think whether or not I had to up the difficulty level. By the time that I reached stage number 8 I found myself having a hard time cleaning the stages that had previously taken me about 5 minutes to beat.
Master of Mayhem’s RPG mechanics fit very nicely in this game. The game allows you to upgrade talents and your regular upgrades. Talents are divided into five different sections. In these five sections, you can find anything from a talent that will give you more health to one that will push enemies away. The upgrades section is divided into four 
sections. In your upgrade section you can find upgrades to the rate of fire, damage done, critical hits, and range. Each time that you cash in to upgrade your talents or your upgrades your play style changes. At the beginning of my journey, my character was pretty slow to move but by the time that I had to upgrade my speed I noticed a drastic change in the way my character moved. It’s nice to see a game use the upgrade system correctly.
Where Master of Mayhem falters is in its levels and the variety of them. The 48 stages that the game provides are all divided into three sections, the city, space, and a car chase with an alien. The thing that I hated most about these stages is that they all felt repetitive, they all felt like I was tasked to do the same thing over and over again. If it hadn’t been for the different guns that this game offers I could have sworn that I was playing the same stages. For example in the city stages, your job is to make your way across the city to a bank where you have to defeat a mini-boss and collect your new weapon, you do this a dozen times. The formula of these stages doesn’t change so you know exactly what to expect from each level. Where the game truly shines, apart from its different guns and its upgrade system, is the action that the game provides.
The sheer adrenaline that Master of Mayhem brings in every stage is second to none, each stage you feel like you are a one man army and the only way that anyone is bringing you down is if they bring an entire fleet with them. At times I felt like I was playing a cartoon version of Tony Montana in Scarface and my job was to bring everyone down. Master of Mayhem does a spectacular job at pinning you against the ropes and like the title of the game says, its pure anarchy which makes for a ton of fun.