This review contains spoilers
And, yet again, Mega Man took another hit. Mega Man 3 is the next evolution of the franchise, focusing a lot more on its platforming, level design, sprite work and music... And it all came at the cost of lowering the difficulty, the utility of the powers that you get from the Robot Masters themselves during normal gameplay and overall just having an unremarkable experience from the first two.
At least the first Mega Man was something new, yeah it wasn't the best but it was the very first game in the series, Mega Man 2 proceeded to make it better in every way possible, but then this game did... Add a slide mechanic! And that's pretty much it. Yeah, it didn't do much and honestly the mechanic itself also feels weirdly implemented in some places, but it's something so minor I don't mind it that much.
In this game they focused on making everything better except the actual gameplay and substance of it, hell, they even upgraded the storytelling a bit with some lore tidbits here and there, but there's just something lacking in this game that made it so underwhelming. Maybe it is that the majority of the game after you beat the main eight Robot Masters makes you go through 4 stages you already beat, with two bosses in there that are sort of "reincarnations" of the previous Robot Masters from Mega Man 2(not the first game, because FUCK Cutman I suppose) and that takes a very big part of the playtime coupled with some pretty easy Wily stages, just for there to be yet another Boss Rush at the end of this. This game loves to make you waste time.
The abilities are very unreliable too, you don't even use them that much, and when you use them they deplete very fast or have some baffling mechanic/gimmick to them that makes you just go for your default Mega Buster for the majority of it, only exception to this would be Rush having some platforming capabilities which is cool and it is a bit more intuitive than "ITEM-1" through 3 in the last game.
But yeah, bad continuation. Didn't live up to what the second one did and just feels in the way. At least they didn't give it up here and decided to go for three more.
At least the first Mega Man was something new, yeah it wasn't the best but it was the very first game in the series, Mega Man 2 proceeded to make it better in every way possible, but then this game did... Add a slide mechanic! And that's pretty much it. Yeah, it didn't do much and honestly the mechanic itself also feels weirdly implemented in some places, but it's something so minor I don't mind it that much.
In this game they focused on making everything better except the actual gameplay and substance of it, hell, they even upgraded the storytelling a bit with some lore tidbits here and there, but there's just something lacking in this game that made it so underwhelming. Maybe it is that the majority of the game after you beat the main eight Robot Masters makes you go through 4 stages you already beat, with two bosses in there that are sort of "reincarnations" of the previous Robot Masters from Mega Man 2
The abilities are very unreliable too, you don't even use them that much, and when you use them they deplete very fast or have some baffling mechanic/gimmick to them that makes you just go for your default Mega Buster for the majority of it, only exception to this would be Rush having some platforming capabilities which is cool and it is a bit more intuitive than "ITEM-1" through 3 in the last game.
But yeah, bad continuation. Didn't live up to what the second one did and just feels in the way. At least they didn't give it up here and decided to go for three more.