Sights & Sounds
- Being a WayForward game, the visual style is excellent. It somehow manages to capture the crispness of the Shantae series while staying very true to the original DuckTales cartoon
- The music is also excellent. Capcom always does a good job with their soundtracks. The DuckTales theme (both the NES game and TV show versions) are the obvious highlights, but the rest of the music is some pretty great butt rock
- Unfortunately, you'll get really tired of the cane bounce sound effect

Story & Vibes
- The story is fairly straightforward. It's not like Scrooge McDuck is a waterfowl of diverse motives; he just wants more money. You just go around collecting gems and valuable macguffins, fight a boss, and move to the next world
- If you grew up watching the TV show in the early 90s or played the original NES game, be prepared for a wave of nostalgia

Playability & Replayability
- The gameplay is simple even by standards for platformers at the time. You really only jump, bounce, and hit rocks with your cane. That's the long and short of the controls
- It's a quick game, so there may be some appeal for completionists who don't mind a challenge getting achievements for higher difficulties. I'm not one of those people, so I'm not picturing a replay anytime soon

Overall Impressions & Performance
- It's not a graphically intensive game, so crank up the resolution to match your display and have fun

Final Verdict
- 6.5/10. An easy recommend for those who liked the franchise growing up. Otherwise, it's a fairly simplistic (but still enjoyable) remaster of an old favorite

It's surprisingly good for a licensed game, but it isn't anything amazing. The standout part of the gameplay is Scrooge's pogo jump mechanic, which feels great to use. The game is also faithful to being a DuckTales game, and it's nice to see all the characters in it. That said, the level design can be very hit or miss, and sometimes the game is very difficult in ways that aren't always fair.

I would've rated this game at least a full point higher if not for the last level of the game, where the punishment for failure at a certain point is so severe that I contemplated giving up after failing several times in a row at the final part and being forced to redo the entire stage. I did stick with it and the feeling of beating the level was satisfying, but one single checkpoint would've been all the game needed to keep the game fun until the end. Or you can just play on easy mode and have infinite lives, but I'm stubborn. And also you also can't change your difficulty after selecting it, so keep that in mind.

6.5/10

DuckTales Remastered was yet another game I got on the Winter Steam Sale this year. It was solid overall, but it felt a little rough around the edges. DuckTales Remastered, is far beyond a remaster. If anything, it could be considered a re-imagining of sorts. While it has similar level beats to the original, Remastered remixes elements of the original DuckTales to make a more metroidvania-esque version of the levels. While the levels have a defined beginning and end, and Scrooge McDuck doesn't get any new toys to use, the levels are open and usually require the player to do some backtracking in order to face the boss. While most of the levels are solid overall, the moveset holds them back a tiny bit. New to the remake is the ability to hit things with your cane, and it works fine, but it can feel annoying in some cases, such as the boss in the Himalayas. Also, somewhat frequently, I found the cane bounce (landing while holding X which propels you higher) to just straight up not function on certain platforms. This got pretty frustrating when it occurred, and while it isn't a huge deal most of the time, it can lead to some unfair deaths. The levels themselves can also be occasionally cheap; in the lava level I had a section where I repeatedly died where you needed to bounce on two geese to make it across. However, sometimes the Goose just doesn't want to spawn, making a very annoying section to replay. Also, while not a major issue, I did find the occasional bug or oddity. Once again, in the Himalayas, there's this part of the level where there's just a random gap in the ceiling. I don't know if it was a secret or not, because I bounced around for about a minute before giving up. This game feels like a prototype of Shantae Half Genie Hero (not to the detriment of either game for the record, I like them both). With its 2.5D graphics and music, it feels like WayForward were getting their feet wet when it came to platformers like this. And you can definitely feel that in some cases here. Overall, I did enjoy my time with Remastered, but it definitely could've been better.

I think I would have appreciated this game more if I was familiar with the show or the original NES game this is meant to be a "remaster" of (this is much closer to a remake imo), since I don't really know any of the characters or background story. I still enjoyed my time with this one, though; its hard to go wrong with a short and simple classic platformer like this one.

Although I said the game is simple, I definitely don't mean it's easy. There's a few other reviews here talking about how tough this game can get, but wow this game was WAY harder than I ever expected. Nothing wrong with a challenging game, especially since this game's so short it'd be over in like 4 hours if it wasn't difficult. I'm just shocked that it was this difficult since it seems like an easy stroll of a game from the whole tone of it. I think part of what made this game such a tough time for me is that Scrooge's movement never felt all that natural to me. He doesn't control badly, but he just feels sluggish and floaty. It took me a bit to get used to the weird windup he has to do with his cane to hit in front of him and his signature pogo jump just reminded me of how bad I am at playing with Cranky Kong in Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze. Admittedly, much of that is a skill issue on my part, but man Scrooge's physics and movement was just not doing it for me in the levels where you have to make a mad dash to survive. It doesn't help that you only get two lives (technically three because this is one of those games where 0 technically counts as a life). I also really felt the lack of checkpoints with how much stuff you'll have to be redoing each time you get a game over, which was absolutely infuriating with the final level considering that its a pretty long level where you need to beat a boss and two different "rush to the end or else you die" segments. Took me a lot of memorization to do that level.

I just want to make a brief (for my standards anyway) paragraph here about the visuals and music. The music is wonderful, but the graphics were...very odd. I know this game came out in 2013, but the 3D does not blend well with the 2D parts at all and its very distracting. I kinda wish this game was fully 2D in that really charming art style it already has, sort of like a Cuphead or Wario Land Shake-It, but I also understand that those games were very difficult to make in part because of that stylistic choice so I can see why they didn't want to do it.

Overall, I did enjoy my time with DuckTales Remastered, but it was a surprisingly tough game. I enjoyed the difficulty for every level except that final one; I know I never want to replay that again. 3.5 stars from me. If the game didn't make me replay the entire level from the beginning after getting a game over, I'd bump it up.