Gadgetory

when talking about minding number nine there's a good bit of baggage to unpack there's a lot of anger and hate on the internet for this game and for good reason this is one of the highest-profile Kickstarter disasters when it comes to video games a spiritual successor to megaman a classic series loved by many that's seemingly been abandoned by the company that owns at capcom and after a very successful Kickstarter all kinds of promises are made we see push back after push back after push back poor looking demos a horrendous launch trailer and now finally the release of the game that is far from meeting the hype that was built up around it and with all that in mind I have to admit I actually gotta like the game don't get me wrong it's far from being a great game it has a lot of problems including bugs on certain platforms inconsistent frame rates and just flat-out bad gameplay design choices but there's still some good in here that calls out to me that I just can't ignore the core gameplay is undeniably Megaman with an emphasis on two very simple moves jump and shoot with an added emphasis and mighty number nine being the dash something Megaman could do but has been expanded upon a lot basically whenever you damaged NMU enough before killing them you can dash through them to be awarded points and you can also sometimes absorb little benefits from enemies like a usable healing item or temporary buffs to attack speed and defense it's kind of a fun play on Mega Man's basic idea of absorbing his enemy's powers but now applied to regular enemies to which i think is pretty cool and the speed at which the game can be played is a lot faster than traditional Megaman games thanks to being able to josh pretty much non-stop and freely in typical series fashion you use these skills to take on eight different bosses in whatever order you like each of which gives you a new power that serves as a weakness to another boss and might help make some parts of levels easier based on all this alone honestly the game does a pretty good job nothing incredible but about as much as you'd expect from a game that is intentionally trying its best not to be original where the problems come though is the entire lack of polish thrown in this game in pretty much every way possible and an oversaturation of bonus content promised by Kickstarter stretch goals that just feels like unnecessary blow that took time away from important work that the single-player story drastically needed while the game certainly tries hard to look like megaman with characters and enemies clearly just being remixes of things we've seen before everything just feels super sterile and boring stages like a lot of details character movements and facial expressions appear constantly dead inside animations like explosions look horrible and the game has some of the most uninspiring lazy background music ever teamed up with painful sound and character voicing with a few exceptions here and there there's also a few major shortcomings in the core gameplay switching between sub weapons is annoying and inefficient and levels do a really bad job of teaching or telling you about certain little gimmicks one of the most annoying being a doughnut-shaped stage where you need to backtrack every now and then to hunt down an enemy sniper covering over the same ground over and over and over again the most glaring problem by far though is the performance issues this game suffers which varies by platform the wii u version is apparently all kinds of unplayable while the ps4 version which i played on suffered from constant dropped frames which is just silly considering how underwhelming the game's graphics are and then there's the bonus modes a lot of dev time was taken adding these challenge maps that had a co-op and all kinds of other little features that honestly the game just didn't need a lot of them are just boring in design and offer a forced way to pad more hours into the game and we're really only added because they were stated stretch goals along with putting this thing on pretty much every platform in current use which only really hurt it in the end the only bit of bonus content I found worth it was the game's only current DLC which comes with physical copies of the game offering a new level of play through and unlockable second playable character which makes for a much harder and frantic game where you're constantly losing health a gimmick that I honestly found really fun until you come up against bosses where you have no way to gain life and now just have to rely on never getting hit ever I think the most important thing to take away from mighty number 9 is that crowdfunded games need to not get stretch goal happy especially when it comes to bonus modes online content and porting the game to several more platforms because in the end all these things add up open up new problems for development and eventually lead to the very core of the game suffering from a lack of much-needed polishing a lot of good games have come from crowdfunding but this harsh reminder the devs need to be careful what they promise especially when you're relying on legacy and name power of classic games that being said while the game has failed in many ways to be some kind of Savior and nod to retro gaming it does still accomplish its very core goal being a fun super obvious clone of megaman for 20 to 30 bucks I wouldn't advise grabbing at anytime soon because there are some very obvious bug work that needs to be done especially on some platforms but honestly I'm not that mad paying 25 bucks for this if you just want knockoff Megaman you'll find some fun here if you're looking for the second coming of retro platformer and goodness just turn your head and move on