As you might expect from me if you’ve read some of my previous posts, I haven’t had much luck with my non-Steam games, either. The only other game I beat this time was Ikachan, and that game has pretty bland level design, with the challenge all coming from controls/physics.

I feel like I got close to beating Lyle In Cube Sector (which has a similar issue with how your cubes are always thrown in an upward arc, making it really hard to hit enemies), but I reached a point where seemingly every path was blocked by a giant cube, and I couldn’t figure out what to do with the cow since I’d still get killed by the hazard waterfall even when walking with the cow (and I’m opposed to looking up walkthroughs since games should be able to stand on their own). Still, I can at least rely on Mega Man fangames to maintain a base level of quality, right?

This plays like a typical Mega Man game, except you’ll notice very quickly that your jump arc happens faster than usual. It’s not nearly as bad as Dave Dave Dave, but it will take you a while to get used to, and even then, it’ll still get you killed occasionally. A notable consequence is: when you need to jump on a disappearing block directly above you, you have to wait dangerously late or else you’ll fall through it before it spawns and die.

Worse, underwater jumping is even more butchered. If you hold the jump button for too long, you’re forced to keep going until the height of your jump, even if it’s still a few units away and there are spikes there. Again, you have to let go dangerously early in order to make these seemingly-innocuous jumps. Thankfully, there aren’t too many underwater segments in the game.

Another significant difference is that you have less invincibility time because your stunned-knockback lasts longer. If you know Mega Man, you’ll know that boss attacks can be quick, to the point where you basically have to memorize their pattern to have a chance at avoiding their attacks. The shortened invulnerability exacerbates this problem, because now you often have next to no time to recover when you do get hit. I fought Jolt Man without his weakness power, and every time I got hit, I’d almost always get hit again if I didn’t jump right after regaining control.

You might think this is a refresh rate issue, but the game has an issue of the opposite type: your charge shot takes longer to charge than in official games. The sound effect is the same, so you’ll hear the “max charge” wobble and still end up shooting a mid-charge blast.

One thing it does accurately to the official games is the shop, but you can only buy extra lives, E-Tanks, W-Tanks, and artwork; no permanent upgrades like what Mega Man 9 and 10 offer. There are three blank slots that tell you the item is “not in stock,” but I beat the game and nothing ever showed up there, so I dunno what to tell you.

Oh, and the shop is the only place you can get those tanks; they’re never in a level like in other Mega Man games.

Now, level design. The game has an intro stage, but it’s rather empty and unnecessary; the boss can quickly jump between the left and right sides of the screen, but since you start the battle at the left side, that’s a cheap hit. The Stage Select places the cursor on Illusion Man by default, so I went after him first, and aside from the aforementioned issue with disappearing blocks and jump timing, this stage isn’t too bad. My only other major issue with it is there’s a screen where part of the ground disappears diagonally and makes you think there’s a split path, but the pink-colored bricks below the pink-colored bricks you’re standing on are actually background objects, so going in the hole kills you:

Illusion Man can spawn harmless duplicates to jump around you, but they’re only an issue when Illusion Man himself starts jumping around in the exact same way.

I tried Primal Man’s stage next, but yikes, this stage is brutal. Instead of being able to move left/right on your own like normal, you’re forced on a rail, only able to jump and shoot. Despite this, enemies still take multiple shots to kill; turns out you’re supposed to shoot their balloons to make them fall off screen, but the railroading is so restrictive that you’ll still probably get hit by their aimed shots anyway. There’s one spot in particular (right after the collectible E) where it’s next to impossible to avoid getting hit, yet getting hit stun-locks you into spikes and kills you outright. I had to come back after beating a few other Robot Masters and getting their weapons, and this part was still a struggle. The level goes back to typical Mega Man platforming afterward, maybe a bit overly bland except the last room before the boss.

One more thing I’ll praise about the game is that the Stage Select tells you which levels have a collectible letter in them, and since I noticed the collectible E seemed similarly out-of-reach with default equipment, I decided to go after the Robot Masters that didn’t have one, starting with Jolt Man. His stage has electric balls that get redirected by certain tiles, though said tiles only show a small outline of an arrow briefly before the redirection, so they can still catch you off guard. There are parts where you can shoot the tiles to change where they redirect the electricity, but very little is done with this mechanic (they never show up outside this level). The level also has Sniper Joes that shoot abruptly with no warning, and the electric plugs aren’t introduced fairly since–even though they act like Thwomps but with some outward electricity on landing–the first one is placed in a small optional path with a low ceiling. Jolt Man himself normally shoots projectiles along the ground and jumps left/right, but he can also have lightning bolts come down from above, usually when you’re already mid-jump and can’t react to them effectively.

Tune Woman’s stage also doesn’t have a good introduction for one of its unique enemies. The level starts with a drop into a hole, but if you’re too close to the wall when the screen transitions, you’ll take contact damage since the enemies are placed right where the path opens up…on both sides.

This level also has a darkness gimmick, but you don’t get a light around yourself; instead there are only small lights around domes, which you need to shoot to keep the lights active, and they don’t always show you everything you need to know about (like a unique Metall that rushes down onto a platform you’re about to land on, and is first introduced behind said darkness). If the lights dim completely, not only can you see nothing besides certain enemies and the domes, but also those robot bat enemies start zooming across the screen faster than you can react to them. Near the end of the stage, the room goes dark on its own (without the bats, thankfully), so you just gotta sit there and wait for the lights to come back on, which takes way longer than necessary.

Besides Primal Man’s stage, everything here has at least been in-line with what you might see in an official Mega Man game…but then there’s Cypher Man’s stage. It starts with a four-way split path, each only consisting of 2-3 rooms with a glowing LED for each path to indicate which of them you’ve completed. Thing is, only two of those paths have a simple switch to complete them; one path makes you match a binary code by shooting two buttons (and they aren’t just +1 and -1; you have to hit both in some combination), and the other is a freaking ROT13 puzzle, where you just have to keep shooting the up or down arrow until the word shows up and the LED comes on. Worse, Cypher Man himself incorporates the binary code into his boss battle: he’s completely shielded during this part, but can still attack you while you’re struggling to use the binary counter that you’re still not entirely sure how to work with.

Also, after every two Robot Masters you defeat, the Stage Select locks you into doing a new level with one of the Mega Man Killers from the Game Boy Mega Man games (and the Mega Man 10 DLC) as the boss, but they do have new attacks here, so it’s not a complete rehash. Ballade’s and Punk’s stages are super short, but if you die against the boss even once, you’re kicked from the level and the Stage Select goes back to normal, so the only way you can try again is to save-scum and start the level over. Enker’s stage also works the same way, but it’s a feature-length stage (complete with a mini-boss!) that you’d have to replay every single time the Mega Man Killer kills Mega Man. Plus, the stage’s bomb-dropping gimmick can sometimes glitch and not drop the bomb, and if this happens for the first bomb in the stage, your introduction to this gimmick is the second bomb, which drops on you when you’re very close to the top of the screen and can’t react to it in time.

Once you’ve cleared the Stage Select, you reach Bass’s level, which has doppelganger enemies (not Doc Robots) that briefly transform into an official Robot Master for one attack before transforming again. It’s a pretty great example of how to do homages/nostalgia bait properly, without it being a total lazy rehash, but there are a couple problems with it. For one, when it turns into Wind Man, it moves instantly, giving you no time to react, but it also has an equal chance of flying off the screen and vanishing without a trace. Also, the levels are not designed around the enemy turning into Metal Man; not only do you only have half the screen to react to both projectiles, but you’re also often fighting a literal uphill battle, making it even more difficult to avoid them. Bass himself is just a cheap copy of his pattern from Mega Man 7’s Wily Stage 1, with it only being more difficult here since there are only two spots in the arena where you can get under his jump without taking damage.

The first proper Wily stage is not only an underwater level (with this game’s butchered underwater jumping), not only does it have enemies that zoom across the screen way faster than you can react, but after the halfway point, you’re forced into an auto-scrolling segment where you’re chased by an invulnerable version of the Mega Man 2 Giant GutsMan tank. I know Mega Man 4 and 8 have their own auto-scrolling segments, but they give you full access to the entire screen, whereas here, half the screen is taken up by that tank, and between its own attacks and the enemies and pits that spawn, your window of opportunity for getting past certain obstacles is pretty small, especially if you’re not using any boss weapons. After you escape the tank, there’s a much more empty auto-scrolling segment where spikes fall from behind you, and besides the aforementioned underwater jumping, the only issue is that the room keeps scrolling after reaching the hole you need to jump into, so you might mistake it for another pit and then get trapped when the spikes fall and block the hole from you. The boss didn’t seem too bad except the whole “you can fall on it and take damage during phase transitions,” but then again, I had unlocked Beat from getting all the collectible letters, so I didn’t have to jump up to shoot it when I got to its third phase.

The second Wily stage isn’t too bad, but the boss at the end is immune to the Mega Buster, so if you’re out of the weapons you can hurt it with, you’re screwed. Proto Man shows up to help you with this fight, but even though his buster can damage the boss, he can die, so it doesn’t rectify the initial issue.

The third Wily stage brings back the on-rail mechanic from Primal Man’s stage, but it’s ironically easier here since there are fewer enemies and straighter paths. That said, it does place a Metall Blimp in your way near the end, so you gotta do trial and error to figure out which weapon can kill it in time so you’re not stun-locked into the spike again. The level’s mid-boss is mostly okay, but I’m pretty sure the physics can mess up here and have you fall straight down instead of be dragged back with the auto-scroll like normal, as my first couple attempts got me stuck between blocks and killed. The second half of the stage has those timed bombs you have to step on, but it also combines them with ice tiles, so you need to use your flame-shield power to get past the ice wall, then pause and switch to another weapon so the flame is deactivated before you land on the ice floor:

This happens a few times, and it isn’t properly built-up-to. I didn’t even know I could shoot extra flames with the flame-shield power on until I did so by accident in this level (you’re not shown how powers work like in Mega Man X). The boss is Bass again, and his pattern is mostly the same except now he suddenly has the boomerang fist from the Game Boy Mega Man V, and spikes will sometimes come down from above.

The fourth Wily stage is where you re-fight the Robot Masters, but instead of having the choice between all eight like in every Mega Man game except 1 and X, you only get to pick between two before you have to go through a carbon-copy of a segment from an official Mega Man level (enemies are slightly different, but that’s it) before reaching the next pair. This means you can’t go “Cypher Man and Jolt Man sucked, so I’ll take them out first” since they don’t show up until the third pairing. The boss at the end of the stage is similar to the doppelganger enemies in Bass’s stage in that the boss shoots projections of official Robot Masters that do one attack before disappearing, and if you shoot them enough, the boss’s actual weak point shows up for you to shoot at. It’s not bad.

The final level is pretty empty except for a few disappearing block segments. When you reach the final boss, there are two more empty screens after the checkpoint you need to walk past, then the boss has a 15+-second-long intro that can’t be skipped. The boss itself has its weak points above the ground, so you’ll need to jump to hit them, and the boss can also pop its fists in from the sides of the screen, so you’ll want to stay in the middle so you can react to them…except the boss can also abruptly shoot projectiles from its mouth, which is right where you’d be if you’re jumping to hit its weak points and staying in the center to avoid its fists!

If there’s a pattern to when he fires those shots, I never figured out what it was. I eventually broke down and just bought two E-Tanks to get through the fight, though I only ended up using one.

The boss has a second phase, except now you’re forced to use Rush Jet and a non-charging buster instead of any other powers you got in the game. Plus, the boss is a teleporting Wily Capsule that can shoot projectiles that move faster than you, meaning you have to be in the right spot and moving to the right spot to avoid the homing shots when he shoots them from the center of the screen. You also can’t get through the orbiting projectiles unscathed unless you move right when they expand their radius. I burned my other E-Tank to beat this boss.

Overall, this one’s kinda hard to recommend. It’s free and there’s a lot it does right, but sometimes it strays a bit too far from what makes Mega Man work.