This game serves as a reminder: just because a game looks like something else doesn’t mean it fully understands why people like the thing it resembles.

• Oniken
  

  2 hours playtime

  15 of 32 achievements

This is an action platformer. Along with your standard left/right movement and jump ability, you can swing your sword by pressing X and you can throw a grenade (of which you have a finite amount) by holding up and pressing X.

Obviously, this game is trying to imitate the style of old-school platformers, right down to its graphics and game-play. It has responsive controls, easy-to-learn enemy patterns, and it even has a soundtrack that’s really catchy except for that one song that sounds like garbage (all old-school platformer soundtracks have that one song); now that’s dedication. Heck, it even has the jarring transitions between a camera that only scrolls horizontally and one that can scroll vertically. There are even a couple boss introductions that show you the correct timing for dodging their faster attacks, which is something even Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 didn’t do. Also, when you beat the game, you unlock an extra stage where you play as another character during an early part of the game, which is neat.

However, there is one significant element of old-school platformers that this game lacks: the ability to one-hit-kill most standard enemies. If you’ve ever played an old-school platformer, think back to them and you’ll remember that quite a few of the most common enemies could be killed in one hit: the ghouls, bats, and medusa heads from Castlevania, the foot soldiers from Contra, the drones from Zook Hero 2, the wildlife from Rambo, pretty much all of the enemies from Ninja Gaiden that weren’t bosses–heck, even the Goombas from Super Mario Bros. are a good example (the only exceptions I can think of are games like Blaster Master where you have a ranged attack as your default weapon and can take enemies out from a distance). This game, on the other hand, has almost all of its enemies take at least two hits before they die, including the common foot soldiers. That may sound rather minor, but when everything else is designed so closely to old-school traditions, this design decision clashes with the fast-paced nature that many old-school platformers are designed around. For example, during the part where you’re on a moving platform and the way forward is a small platform with a soldier on it, traditional old-school games would let you jump to the platform and attack as you’re falling to take the enemy out. However, in this game, if you try that, the enemy will just keep going on its pattern (now with its invincibility frames active since you hit it), shooting you off of the ledge and forcing you to climb back up. It makes the game much more frustrating than I think was intended, as it really comes across like the game wasn’t designed around the fact that certain enemies take a couple hits to kill.

To be fair, there’s one enemy type that dies in one hit (the fast-moving alien), but it only appears, like, five times in the whole game, and any other one-hit-kill enemies the game may or may not have are equally as rare.

Beyond that, the game also has some cheap level design at times. The most obvious one is how the game handles the pink wall turrets: it starts off as an ordinary wall that has absolutely no distinction from any other wall, but once you get near it, the pink wall turret suddenly pops out and fires a bullet. That’s some Miracle-of-Almana-level nonsense right there. What’s worse is in stage 7, there’s a vertical segment you have to scale twice, and they’ll pop up only during the second time. To be fair, once a pink wall turret pops out, it stays there and fires in a set pattern, so you can usually take it out after getting sniped.

Speaking of stage 7, there’s a part where the game introduces an enemy that flies in from the left side of the screen and shoots down, but one of its appearances is right after you enter a vertical segment from the left side, so you’re not given much time to react to it and will probably be hit.

Overall, this game is hard to recommend. It’s cheap ($5 at full price) and it gets a bunch of things right, but it’s also cheap (wall turrets), and what the game does mess up is something rather integral to what makes old-school level design fun. If you’re a fan of old-school platformers, maybe pick it up on sale and temper your expectations.