The game is very evidently half baked, with a sense of bugginess in every motion and, to top it off, the more gimmicky ideas seem to tell that there wasn’t even a solid concept to work upon. Add a weak intro level and a tiresome story told through unskippable cutscenes that appear again and again, the mixing for failure is done. Perhaps because it is so messy, or out of curiosity of why this one in all the franchise was so poorly received, it is also a Mega Man game that kept me interested up to the very end, which is an achievement.
Sometimes intentionally, some others not, the title ends up building pretty tight fights quite often. On the most probably thought part, the initial two protagonists are a simple yet successful complement to each other, the agility but risky close range offensive of Zero and the safety on the distance but poor tools when cornered of Axl. The levels themselves tend to be quite bad, the best thing I can say about them is that they can be speedrun skipped without issues, which usually is the best way to tackle them. Saying that something is easily avoidable is secretly one of the ugliest insults, but at least it lends space into a boss rush approach.
The 3D is interestingly used in these fights, always slightly touching the camera angle or the arena navigation to modify in turn the perception and dynamics of the action. Again, the bosses are dumb, but in their dumb behaviour there is something that clicks more than it should. There is the fire guy who will circle around while shooting with 2 clones of him, occasionally cross attack through you, at the center of the ambush you’ll also have to deal with a missile launching platform and, to finish off, you are fighting on top of a mech, so it won’t be rare to get some weird momentum mixed in. What is a very simple behavior unexpectedly keeps you moving and reacting in a pace that some action games could only dream of. Boss fights keep maintaining this tension constantly just using simple patterns that build on top of each other and rarely leave room for breath. There’s the water boss who not only doesn’t leave any clear window open to get free hits, the classically boring design where offense and defense are separate things contaminating even the most technically complex hack and slash of your preference, but will keep switching patterns all the time. For some, this is poor design. In my dictionary, this is what you call a proper fight.
A disaster? Kind of. But one that at least tries things and can be unironically enjoyed, much more than the rest of the NFT like produced entries in the series.
Sometimes intentionally, some others not, the title ends up building pretty tight fights quite often. On the most probably thought part, the initial two protagonists are a simple yet successful complement to each other, the agility but risky close range offensive of Zero and the safety on the distance but poor tools when cornered of Axl. The levels themselves tend to be quite bad, the best thing I can say about them is that they can be speedrun skipped without issues, which usually is the best way to tackle them. Saying that something is easily avoidable is secretly one of the ugliest insults, but at least it lends space into a boss rush approach.
The 3D is interestingly used in these fights, always slightly touching the camera angle or the arena navigation to modify in turn the perception and dynamics of the action. Again, the bosses are dumb, but in their dumb behaviour there is something that clicks more than it should. There is the fire guy who will circle around while shooting with 2 clones of him, occasionally cross attack through you, at the center of the ambush you’ll also have to deal with a missile launching platform and, to finish off, you are fighting on top of a mech, so it won’t be rare to get some weird momentum mixed in. What is a very simple behavior unexpectedly keeps you moving and reacting in a pace that some action games could only dream of. Boss fights keep maintaining this tension constantly just using simple patterns that build on top of each other and rarely leave room for breath. There’s the water boss who not only doesn’t leave any clear window open to get free hits, the classically boring design where offense and defense are separate things contaminating even the most technically complex hack and slash of your preference, but will keep switching patterns all the time. For some, this is poor design. In my dictionary, this is what you call a proper fight.
A disaster? Kind of. But one that at least tries things and can be unironically enjoyed, much more than the rest of the NFT like produced entries in the series.