Great animation and a lot of boss fights don't make a great game. If you've played the Contras, the Mega Mans, the Metal Slugs, and TurboGrafx-16 shooters, you've seen most of what Cuphead has to offer, including its supposedly high difficulty (as commemorated by the adolescent, predictable outrage over Dean Takahashi's gee-whiz ineptitude: https://venturebeat.com/games/cuphead-hands-on-my-26-minutes-of-shame-with-an-old-time-cartoon-game/).

Despite the absence of a compelling array of power-ups, Cuphead is not that hard. Unlike the truly uncompromising shooters (Contra IV, Mega Man, Super Star Soldier, R-Type, and so on), Cuphead throws pieces of a game at its audience: you don't have to fight through a level to get the opportunity to lock horns with a boss. Instead, you move an avatar on a world map, which provides instant access to the bosses. If you're even halfway familiar with classic shooters, most of these battles will not be intimidating; more than a few will be quite boring due to their plagiarism. And inexperienced gamers can simply "get good" without the inconvenience of having to learn levels or any potential complexities of an upgrade system.

It's more than clear that Studio MDHR has a superficial appreciation for shooters and intended to score a trendy indie hit by overcompensating with admittedly impressive hand-drawn animation. The actual levels in Cuphead are pathetic at best: short, obvious, undramatic, phoned-in, an insulting waste of time. And the horizontally scrolling battles feel like lukewarm ideas that would have been rejected by the makers of groundbreaking fare like Gradius, Life Force, and Lords of Thunder. I could only imagine liking Cuphead if I were ignorant of video game history and the mechanical possibilities of the art form.