There are some standouts among the 15 animated shorts in Amazon’s new videogame-themed anthology series—the New World episode is pretty darn good—but on the whole, Secret Level has all the flaws you might expect to find in a bunch of publisher-approved odes to iconic (and some not-so-iconic) brand mascots. Some of the episodes feel like ads, others like cutscenes that would be fine if we got to take control when they were over, but don’t impress as standalone stories.
The episodes are fairly short, running around 10-12 minutes each. It feels like brevity should be a virtue here—who wants an hour-long Pac-Man joke?—but they actually wind up feeling too slight in many cases.
We divvied up the episodes between us and watched ’em all. Below you’ll find our quickie reviews plus a 1-5 rating on a scale befitting each episode. You can check out the show yourself when it begins streaming on Prime Video on December 10.
Episode 1: Dungeons & Dragons
This didn’t quite work for me. I think the thing that made last year’s D&D movie work so well was that it understood that D&D is fundamentally a bit silly. Get too self-serious with it, as this episode does, and you just end up with something that feels like an intro cutscene from a forgotten action-RPG.
There’s lots of cool visuals on display, no doubt, but I think this episode was always going to need more than that. With properties like Warhammer 40k and Spelunky, there’s a novelty just in seeing them represented in a big budget, cinematic way. But when it comes to fantasy adventurers, dragons, and magic, we’ve seen all that in shiny CG a million times before. It needed to really lean into what makes D&D unique and interesting to stand out, and a surprise at the end of this episode wasn’t enough to achieve that.
There are some interesting characters in the party—the stoic dwarf monk is fun, and I’d have loved to see more of the episode’s orc druid wildshaping in battle. But what an odd choice to devote most of the screentime to a stereotypically dour paladin—I’m guessing the creators didn’t realise that the reason so many players pick that class is just for the overpowered smite attacks, not the dull piousness. —Robin Valentine, Senior Editor
Rating: 2/5 saving throws
Episode 2: Sifu
The best thing I can say about this episode is that it made me want to replay the game. It’s a brief fight scene bookended by a bit of rumination on how we spend our lives, basically an ultra-condensed version of the game itself. The fight is quite true to Sifu’s action movie-style martial arts combat, which is some of the best ever put in a game, but it’s not the kind of thing I really want to watch someone else play. If you find yourself wanting to grab the imaginary controller out of the show’s hands and do a better job beating up nightclub goons, then go play Sifu. —Tyler Wilde, US Editor-in Chief
Rating: 2/5 punches
Episode 3: New World
I’m tired of animated projects using the biggest movie stars they can get instead of hiring performers who are genuinely talented in voice acting, but it’s hard to argue with the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a boastful, stupid, self-absorbed jackass of a king in the New World episode.
There are a lot of well-timed gags, fun references to respawning and NPC trainers, and even a nod to one of Arnold’s memes as he’s taught important lessons over and over and stubbornly refuses to learn from any of them. “You’re pretty bad at doin’ things,” his servant says just before the king once again runs off to do more things, badly. –Christopher Livingston, Senior Editor
Rating: 4/5 choppas
Episode 4: Unreal Tournament
I have some truly fond memories of staying up all night playing Unreal Tournament, and I mean all night. Until the sun came up and I realized I had to go to work on absolutely no sleep. Secret Level’s UT episode doesn’t exactly rekindle those fires for me, but the action sequences (it is almost entirely action sequences) are good, and the two things I wanted to see most, my favorite weapon and one very special, utterly iconic map, both make an appearance. No complaints here. —Christopher Livingston
Rating: 4/5 telefrags
Episode 5: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
If this sequel to Space Marine 2 is trying to give us some insight into its protagonist, Titus, by flashing back to his childhood, it doesn’t really work. He comes off as another stoic killing machine—just like the other marines—rather than the 40K equivalent of a rookie cop who breaks the rules but gets the job done, which is how he comes across in the games.
But that doesn’t really matter, because it succeeds as a combat showcase full of gory deaths, and by giving Chaos all the personality the Ultramarines lack. The cultists are straight out of Mad Max and look like they’re having a great time right up until the second they get messily dispatched, and the mutated sorceress is super unsettling, especially the way her wing-like limbs fold away.
It doesn’t really need to be connected to Space Marine 2 at all, and would have worked just as well without the videogame link. I haven’t seen a 40K fight with this much grand guignol gusto and eerie oddness since the Astartes animation. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor
Rating:4/5 skulls
Episode 6: Pac-Man
Of all the episodes of Secret Level I’ve seen, this is by far the weirdest. And it’s no accident: according to the show’s creators, Bandai Namco said “We would like audiences to wonder what the f**k they did with Pac-Man.” I daresay that goal has been achieved with an unusual and gruesome take on the iconic dot-gobbling circle. I don’t really understand the episode and it seems barely connected to the game, but that’s what I like about it. —Christopher Livingston
Rating: 4/5 Clydes
Episode 7: Crossfire
Do you like badass operators saying badass things and all sharing the same personality: badass? They yell a lot of stuff like “Lost visual!” and refer to the person they’re escorting as the “Package,” that sorta thing? I don’t know much about Crossfire except that it’s a Counter-Strike-like, but this doesn’t make me want to play it or even learn more about it. The episode is one of the longest in the series but mostly feels like a trailer for a direct-to-streaming action film starring, I dunno, Frank Grillo, that you never watch because you don’t subscribe to Starz. —Christopher Livingston
Rating: 1/5 Packages
Episode 8: Armored Core
It dawns on me that the problem with the nearly realistic style of imagery and animation in some of these episodes is that they are reminiscent of videogame cutscenes, and why would I want to spend more time watching videogame cutscenes than I already do? Anyway, Keanu Reeves is a hard-drinkin’, hard-livin’ rough and tumble burnout who grunts and growls and talks to a voice in his head, and it’s hard not to feel like I’ve already seen him do that for about 30 hours in a game already. Because I have. —Christopher Livingston
Rating: 1/5 Silverhands
Episode 9: The Outer Worlds
This episode works for a while, giving me the urge to dive back into the colorful and satirically corporate-run universe of The Outer Worlds. A lovelorn nobody submits to horrible product testing experiments in hopes of reuniting with a scientist he simps for, which is grimly entertaining, but then it takes a stab at sentimentality and misses. I blame Pixar for making everyone think they need to aim for the heartstrings when a simply entertaining story is plenty. —Christopher Livingston
Rating: 3/5 saltunas
Episode 10: Mega Man
This one has that uncannily smooth, hyper-cute look that permeates ArtStation. Something weirder would’ve been welcome. The length of these episodes feels like more of a problem the more of them I watch. They’re so slight—this one’s just seven minutes—that they can wind up feeling like advertisements instead of short films. This one seems aimed at introducing kids to the concept of Mega Man rather than pleasing fans of the series, who are mostly probably in their 40s. —Tyler Wilde
Rating: 1/5 arm cannons
Episode 11: Exodus
Look, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this. It’s an episode about a sci-fi game no one has played that bounces around so many planets and characters and factions it needs near-constant narration to keep up with, which ain’t great for a 10 minute show. One guy has some kinda cyberbog leopard bodyguard, though. That was cool. —Christopher Livingston
Rating: 1/5 large loyal cybercats
Episode 12: Spelunky
I guess Spelunky isn’t a bad place to explore the concept of repeatedly dying and starting over and what that means to a character in a videogame. Why does it happen? How does it happen? After dozens or hundreds of deaths and rebirths, would it take a mental toll? But this segment fails to capture the hilarity and ruthlessness of Spelunky’s systems, and worse, it attempts to craft a heartwarming message that feels completely incongruent to the game. Like me missing a jump in Spelunky, this episode falls flat. —Christopher Livingston
Rating: 1/5 angry shopkeepers
Episode 13: Concord
I was hoping this episode would blow me away, just for the dramatic irony, but Concord’s message from beyond the grave was clearly meant for an audience that’s already in love with Concord’s universe, which doesn’t exist because the game was canned days after launch. —Tyler Wilde
Rating: 2/5 quirky aliens
Episode 14: Honor of Kings
I don’t know much about Honor of Kings other than that it’s a mobile MOBA, so I’m not sure how relevant to the game this episode is. I do love the idea of a massive living city controlled by an AI that appears to be breaking down, but the episode gets almost immediately bogged down with exposition, a bit of a problem since it’s only 15 minutes long. —Christopher Livingston
Rating: 2/5 board games played to decide someone’s fate
Episode 15: PlayStation
A bike courier is chased by Sony characters from another dimension: If you’re trying to manufacture a PlayStation mascot team-up, it’s not a bad premise. It still comes off as a long advertisement, and I expected to see some deeper cuts in a 10-minute parade of references. —Tyler Wilde
Rating: 2/5 PlayStation exclusives
