Kick Master (1992)

Beat in slow motion mode. This game was more like Castlevania than other types of 2D platformers. The jump was very high and floaty but you could press down to fall faster, which was very helpful and should be a feature in more such games. Combat was challenging early on due to the lack of speed, damage and reach of your kick moves. The basic standing and jumping kick hit up diagonal and had slow speed, making it not good unless going after an enemy on higher ground. The duck kick was much faster but I still had to be careful to attack from behind or move in and out of range to avoid taking hits. The duck up kick was the best move in the game because it completely negated all momentum of the enemy, allowing easy cheese wins. I even finished off the final boss with this, and some other bosses and mini bosses. It could be combined with jumping to hit aerial enemies but the momentum cancel did not trigger then. Additional kicks were unlocked with xp though I only made it to level 5 out of 7 and never unlocked the last 2 kicks. Killed enemies dropped 3 items which shot upward then spread out and dropped through the screen giving little time to collect them. I had no idea what they were doing so not long into the 1st stage I looked them up; heart for healing, skull for take damage, bottles for mp, crystal for score (lives) and the others for xp. With quick jumping or sliding I could sometimes get 2 of the items, however there was not really enough time to make proper decisions, especially with items going off screen and other enemies and hazards around. Enemies did not respawn and you could not reverse scroll the screen at all, so I missed numerous enemies and their items. Often times my focus was more on grabbing the stuff before it fell off the screen rather than safe efficient combat and platforming. I did not like this aspect. The pickups should have either been bound by collision with the floor or floated where the enemy was killed so there was not a rush to grab them.

My most used kicks were the slide, dive and flying jump, all of which were fast with mobility that could evade damage. Unfortunately they could also lead to death from pits as there was no way to manually stop or save yourself. With the zero reverse scrolling, it was easy to die during the vertical areas simply by jumping and causing the floor you were just on to go just a few pixels off screen, so of course now that means there is a bottomless death pit. Each stage boss dropped magic, which was cast using select and start went into the magic selection menu. Bounce ball was 1st and it was very effective and cheap, making the game play more like Mega Man. The shots came from an orb floating above the guy's head so it was no good for hitting low or even same height enemies. Pretty sure I could shoot straight up but I never saw need for that with how easy up jump kicking was. I used the ball on the final boss where it bounced back and forth until hitting her. A wave beam was a slight upgrade, costing almost twice as much to hit a wide area. Damage seemed about the same and I used it to kill things that were difficult to kick. Lightning did a cone around the character from above, which I used shortly after getting it when surrounded by tough enemies. Then there was an ultimate entire screen lightning nuke that I didn't use, and earthquake that froze enemies for a while. I had enough mp at the end for 1 quake on the final boss but it was so finicky getting close enough to duck kick without taking contact damage that I was save state scumming hard. It was like 1 pixel between safe range to hit and getting hurt. Most of my mp during the game was spent on the 2 healing spells, since hp drops were rare and hp was not restored between areas or at level up. Optimal way to play was to die upon starting new areas to heal to full, but I only bothered once. I never used the decoy spell and never found spike floor protection, projectile shield or ? spell. I did see a couple locations with items floating above spikes, and others high in the air that required the flight spell. I never saw it worth flying in battle or to bypass platforming so the design could have been better. Some enemies were tough but many could be bypassed if you didn't mind forfeiting the loot. Near the end was the most difficult by far as random balls fell across the screen. I took more damage from that than enemies because they moved too fast to dodge, so it was just eat the hits and rush through. Then just before the final boss a gauntlet of shapeshifting enemies, though they did not turn into any bosses or mini bosses. The final boss herself was a slog because she had so much hp. She only did 1 easy to dodge move while teleporting around, and I hit her mostly with slide kick. The trick was to only slide when she was near the center since going towards the edge made it pretty much impossible to avoid damage. Beating the game unlocked a password for hard mode, and there was a 3rd hardest mode after that, but I don't really want to play it again.

There was a lot to like here with the combat, controls and magic. Even though many aspects were better than Shatterhand, the more difficult enemies, pinata but floor is lava loot system, bosses and scrolling made the game less fun. I will give it slightly lower

7.5/10

Anyone who's played JRPGs knows that hitting people with your fists and feet is stronger than any steel could ever be. And this is exactly what gets demonstrated in the opening cinematic of Kick Master, where the hero Thonolan's knight friend gets dead from skeletons, and tells him that only Thonolan's awesome kicking skills can allow him to defeat Belzed.

I kinda think it's more the bouncing-ball magic myself.

Kick Master is a side-scrolling platformer with light RPG elements. You can gain experience, and every 1000 EXP levels up Thonolan, increasing his MP total and unlocking a new kick attack. You also obtain magic along the way, starting from the humble bouncing-ball magic up to the utterly-useless harpy (grow wings and fly) magic. The game does have a nice number of different kicks, about ten, that you gain throughout the game. The main problem is that the NES controller really doesn't have enough buttons for that many abilities (even with using Select for magic), so several upgrades simply replace previously-unlocked kicks. One upgrade adds an automatic second kick to your already-obsolete-by-then basic kick, just leaving you immobile for longer. The ultimate kick is this bizarre flipping kick with an incomprehensible hitbox, which not only replaces the beginning and easy-to-use upright kick but also makes it impossible to use the best kick you obtain in the game. So you might as well just get to Level 4 and live with that.

How do you level up, incidentally? When an enemy is defeated, three random power-ups (or fewer if there's already airborne power-ups on the screen) fly up out of the enemy. The power-ups can give EXP, MP, HP, points (which do give extra lives), and poison (which hurts you). Thonolan's slow movement speed makes it difficult to even get the power-up you want from a defeated enemy. Luck determines entirely whether enemies will spew forth plenty of the 50 EXP power-ups or just the pithy 5 MP power-ups. The bigger MP restores give 10 MP, by the way, so it's your choice between getting the EXP and getting the MP.

I've mentioned the wonky hitboxes before, but the hit detection in this game is...not great. There are also plenty of annoying enemies, including lizardmen who can block your attacks without warning (causing you to pass through them and take collision damage), these transforming knights that seem to only die instead of transforming at completely random, and an abundance of teleporting wizards to harass you during a vertical ratchet-scrolling area. Many of the bosses are complete pains to even attack with your kicks, and two of them only become vulnerable once you've defeated the other parts of them (with no change to even denote the boss's main body is now vulnerable). Because of how difficult it can be just to hit enemies with your kicks, most bosses are best cheesed by using magic, particularly the very-cheap rapid-fire bouncing-ball magic. Of course, if you want a decent amount of MP, you have to forgo EXP, but as I've already mentioned, you might as well just stop at Level 4. You don't get the flying kick, but that tends to accidentally kill you if you're not careful.

One thing I can give Kick Master credit for is that the Options menu actually gives you the button prompts for all of the kicks, including the last two kicks they don't display in the menu (which suck). It's actually very nice graphically, which just makes it a shame that its potential doesn't really come through and it's both tedious and not very long.