While from a glance this looks pretty impressive for the time, it finds itself crushed under its ambitions and the end result is a total trainwreck. There are three different types of levels, one for each character, but each of them plays completely laughably. Rita and Bronski control like wading through cement, while Marsh is so absurdly erratic that his levels might possibly be the worst shooter levels I've played in a video game. Every time I was in a Marsh level I felt like I was dying.

Also, the game is over two hours long and these levels are only padded out by long cutscenes that use a lot of the same animations as each other. It's so sluggish. "Sluggish" is probably the best word for this game as a whole. It would be more fun to watch an actual slug.

Exosquad was a cartoon that I have zero recollection of despite growing up in it's era. It's apparently kind of like a western cartoon version of Gundam with exoframe suits instead of full-sized mechs. All of my memories are entirely with this licensed Genesis title that I very faintly recall playing on Sega Channel. Interestingly, it's developed by Novotrade, responsible for Ecco and Cyborg Justice. This is worth bringing up for reasons I'll explain later.

Three playstyles were attempted here in order to bring some variation towards your stumbling through this: flying sections with J.T. Marsh, side-scrolling shooting with Bronsky, and some 1v1 fighting matches with Rita. The flying sections were easily the worst for me, as they play like Afterburner on crack with asteroid stages that are next to impossible to navigate without taking a bunch of hits on your gigantic hitbox. It has a button to go even faster, which combined with you moving like an oversensitive mouse cursor and the weird angles of the incoming objects made me a tad nauseous like Filburt Turtle. The side-scrolling stuff was actually probably the most decent out of my time once I got used to telling my brain that crouch was pressing left (aiming is tied to up and down), and the fighting sections were just kinda humorously clumsy.

You can definitely tell that Novotrade's frameworks were all over this, because the multiple-sprite riggings for the exoframes during the side-scrolling and 1v1 sections match along with Cyborg Justice's. Hell, the animations during the 1v1 matches feel like they just edited existing sprites, especially on some of the Neosapian enemies (That's the name of the bad guys I think). It sucks that them combining and rejiggering their existing foundations resulted in probably the worst game I've played of their's so far on the Genesis, it's nowhere as memorable as Ecco nor as fun to play around with as Cyborg Justice, and for sure worse than their Edutainment work in Richard Scarry's Busytown and The Magic School Bus.

This is kind of a weird review, because I came into this ready to lambast the show itself for having a shorter lifespan that a common housefly, but it apparently was popular enough to get a second season with 39 episodes over the first's 13. It seems to actually have a following of some sorts rather than just be one of ten-thousand shows made just to sell toys to annoying shit-kids. Looks like it got fucked over by networks putting the show on dumb timeslots, a similar situation happened to Freakazoid too. Shame.

I might need to give it a watch sometime, it's apparently on Peacock, which I happen to have as I'm unfortunately a wrestling fan living in the States and have to deal with that dumb service if I want to watch WWE stuff.

Maybe one of you have heard of this show? Tell me about it if you have.