Being the fourth entry of my 09/23 Brawler-week, i try to review more systematically as well.
Let's start story-wise, where we find a typical 90s fantasy-flick: The evil Beldor reigned over the kingdom of Sellech until he finally was overthrown by the people who built "energized" heroes. With them they managed to seal the soul of Beldor and peace followed. But Clovis, the corrupt son of the king of Sellech, now seeks to harness the power of Beldor and conquer the kingdom for his own. The player(s) now assumes the role of a knight warriors named Kaor (there's a second one for co-op gamemplay, Igor) in order to defeat Clovis.
So we have a sidescrolling brawler here, z-axis included, mostly going from left to right, slashing minions in order to get to the exit or stage boss. During 6 (? - i think so) levels, we encounter pretty different enemies (spear-guys, wild dogs, club-swinging wildlings, undead warriors, explosive-potion-throwing ninja-mages and what not. Bosses range from Long John clones with staffs to flying Dumbledores and Dragons.
So... i am a little torn about this one.
First of all, as a direct follow up to Undercover Cops, which i played before in my brawler week, there was so much candy for me to unwrap. First of all graphics and animation - i found them pretty impressing! I mean, we have waving, animated hair here! All together the sprites have a cool, medival artdesign, are pretty big and well animated in their attack sequences. Then there's the for- and background, layered in sometimes parallax-like scrolling arrangements. There's also some Mode7-Effects, as well when accessing the - pretty much pointless - worldmap between stages, that shows you where you will go next, as in one particular boss-fight, wenn you slide down on an elevator-like platform. Sometimes though, the foreground-layer can come into view and blocks it - pretty annoying. Overall the graphics are well drawn.
Music on the other side... is pretty restricted to a handful of tracks and therefore repetitive. Soundeffects on the other hand - from clinging steel to deathcries and -whimmers are atmospheric.
Let's have a look at the gameplay. You can decide on the difficulty you wanna play on, there's easy, normal and hard. Besides that there's the opportunity to choose between "normal" speed and turbo mode. I chose the latter and in addition pumped it up to 120% speed, which worked better for me. I find the gameplay in 100% normal speed to cluncky and non-responsive. Then again - attacks are well animated and "connect" in the right way to the enemies - at least most of the time. Because when you challenge the bosses, there are several occasions, where you can no damage them - it felt like the game randomly chose to let my hits connect, but not letting them through, indicated by yellow sparks, but no energy drain of the boss. In addition i think that the gameplay is punishing the player, if he or she uses the same attack pattern again and again - at least the bosses can not be harmed by the same attack over and over again - you have to sprinkle in differnet damage patterns.
For that you have the controls to your hand - basically moving, striking (there's - of course - a little combo for repeadedly hitting the strike button), a kind of... weapon-throw? a block mechanism (which needs good timing, and still - doesn't hold up to what it promises, because enemies can circumvent to easily) and a special attack, filling the whole screen and damaging enemies with nice animated, random magic (poison-spitting skull, lightning,... you get the idea). The special needs potions, of which you can have 9 (one special uses up 2, idk what or how to do with a single last one). Besides that, there's gold, keys, treasures (?) and energy in form of bread or meat. All of the lood drops by killing enemies - again, i had the intention the more loot the more often you vary in your attack patterns. I haven't really figured out (or bothered to check) what's the gold for, the keys at least give access to some sprinkled-in bonus levels, where you simply open up chests with it (they have different "key-counts") for, well - more loot. Still, it's an opportunity to refill health during the stages and even get extra lifes.
Varying them somehow feels off anyways, because jumping is very powerful. You have two jump attacks, of which the second one gives you great movement control over the screen and provisions you with an important attack against minions and bosses a like, especially to keep your distance. Basic pattern of the minions is often trying to get behind you. So after a while you're jumping left and right, not careing much about your other options.
One further anoying thing: the screen starts scrolling way to late, when you reach the right end in my opinion. Normally i am used to brawlers scrolling further from when i "overstep" the middle of my current screen (as long as their are no enemies left, mostly). Here, the screen starts when i have almost reached the right end - not letting me see, where i am going or which enemies are coming. So i technically can go back and "anker" the scrolling-border in the middle - but i have to do exactly that then - going back and "puhsing" the screen from left to right. Could have been done better.
In the end i had one full playthrough and most of the time it was fun. Repetitiv only from the 3/3 i'd say and still surprisingly fun though. A little shorter and more polished here and there, and i'd be a 4-starer for me. No regrets though, fun for an afternoon!

Felt like an incredibly basic and run of the mill beat em' up.
In certain aspects, it even feels like a demo.
You have 3 variations of a jumping attack and a 3 hit combo attack. That's pretty much it for your moveset. At least you can block.
Your character seems to strike incredibly slow which is incredibly annoying and with enemies always appearing in groups of 3-5, you'll find yourself in precarious situations constantly.
The game is pretty good visually though.