Not a simple re-release of an experience you can get through emulation.
- redrawn sprites so the game maintains its SNES look whileNot a simple re-release of an experience you can get through emulation.
- redrawn sprites so the game maintains its SNES look while adapting art and stages to widescreen and HD (the SNES version had a *much* narrow FoV, you can't just go high-res with original assets and call it a day, they actually had to redraw all of this to get it to look the way it does - that's a decent amount of work)
- new soundtrack which is pretty good, the option to unlock the original soundtrack is gated behind a pretty challenging achievement (beating the game with no continues is going to be difficult for a lot of people, even on easy)
- two new characters with playstyles very different from the original two. The only new one I've tried so far is the dog (Bullet), he feels like he's supposed to be made for less skilled players (has a kind of autoaim feature and is able to move while shooting), but because of this he gets some clumsiness with the core game mechanics that almost make him more challenging to play at times. It's weird, I love him as a character (because puppy with a robot, come on...), but his design doesn't seem to fit with how the game plays.
- two new stages (the first new stage replaces one of the original stages when in Normal difficulty, the second new stage replaces another original stage on Hard difficulty, Easy is the original stages only)
- local coop up to four playres (original was two player only), a drawback here is difficulty is based on how many players you have. 2P is Easy, 3P is Normal, 4P is Hard. Again this has no effect on the actual difficulty of the game, just the stages you get, but if you do 2P and want to play the new stages, tough luck, sadly. Docking a point for this, it really doesn't make any sense.
The biggest downside for most people will likely be the controls, as they are unique to this game and take some getting used to. The powerups you get are also random, it isn't like Contra where you could memorize which container from each zone would give which powerup and plan accordingly, when a specific powerup drops, it's random, so say Stage 1, the first powerup you can get may be a machine gun one run, and a laser the next. I wasn't a fan of this. There is also a literal "random powerup" that appears on the screen sometimes, it can occasionally be a peashooter which is totally worthless and I wish it wasn't in the game.
It's the 90s weekend rental kind of game, remastered to look and sound good in 2017 while retaining that original charm with some new additions. Overall it's worth it, but I don't think most people will get more than 2 - 3 hours out of this. At least it's priced reasonably on the PC ($20CDN at time of this writing), while the PS4 version is $50CDN for some reason.… Expand
