An early cutscene shows an overview of the city on fire, and it’s hard not to notice that the dozen or so pillars of smoke coming from different buildings are all identical animations copy and pasted across the landscape. The fire and smoke particles are the worst of the bunch, with explosions looking impotent and unthreatening. Everything is polygonal and low detail, cutscenes are barely animated with voice acting that will make your eyes roll back in your head, and it all ends up feeling like this is some early draft of the game that was shipped by mistake. This isn’t a fun sort of challenge where losing is part of the experience, it’s an enraging one.Īnd I could only look at Mighty No.
9, they feel like cheap shots caused by overuse and forced repetition. In the Mega Man games, deaths like this always felt like they were my fault, like there was something I could have done better. Tap one on the final leg of the level? Start over from the beginning. When I finally caught up to the boss, he was protected by pink insta-death electrical wires stretching from floor to ceiling that would turn on and off. I was forced to run through the same parts of the level multiple times, each less fun than the last, and for some reason this was the only course with no checkpoints.
#MEGA MAN 11 PC GAMEPAD USE SERIES#
In the Capitol Building level I chased a sniper robot named Countershade back and forth through a series of long hallways. Not all of the levels are this offensive in their design, but when they’re not frustrating they’re usually uninteresting and repetitive. This was one of the more frustrating and visually cluttered scenes in the game, featuring insta-death silos with questionable hitboxes to avoid. While the jumping and the dash didn’t feel as precise as I would like, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed learning enemy patterns, level layouts, and boss attacks and then using the tools I’ve been given to best them all as efficiently as possible. 9 becomes a game of learning exactly how many hits each enemy can take before I can dash through them, and flowing through a level at high speed is satisfying. While that mechanic is a relatively large departure from Inafune’s other games, it’s a very fun twist on the Mega Man formula.
But the main character, Beck, has an ability Mega Man never had: shooting enemies weakens them, but you have to dash through them to finish the job, absorbing their “Xel” energy in the process. You run to the right, shooting lemon-shaped bullets at your enemies while traversing platforms and obstacles. 9 is Mega Man producer Keiji Inafune’s spiritual successor to the series that made him famous, meant to evoke the spirit of those classic Mega Man games but evolved and adapted for the modern era.