On my first try, I was able to get to the final boss in Arcade mode but failed to beat it before running out of lives and continues on Normal difficulty. This took me a bit less than 3 hours. The game starts out quite easy but gets more difficult after 2/3rds of the way but the original 16-bit games …
On my first try, I was able to get to the final boss in Arcade mode but failed to beat it before running out of lives and continues on Normal difficulty. This took me a bit less than 3 hours. The game starts out quite easy but gets more difficult after 2/3rds of the way but the original 16-bit games were still harder. The game feels short by today's standards and could've used another set of levels maybe featuring the lizard enemies since this game has both wolf and pig enemies from the 16-bit games.
The view is more zoomed out in this game which I think benefits the gameplay. Sparkster's moveset is mostly the same as the first games on Genesis & SNES but also has the auto-filling rocket meter from the second Genesis game. I don't particularly like that shooting projectiles is a separate button rather than combined with the sword attack but after playing the Wolf Fortress level where the rocket meter doesn't auto refill, I can see why the developer made this change but a better solution would've been to make the attack change based on proximity, only a sword attack when close enough to an enemy and a projectile when the enemy is farther away (like the Shinobi games on Genesis). Otherwise I like the controls.
I think there is a fair amount of creativity in the levels and there are a variety of different enemies and obstacles requiring different strategies to beat or overcome. It's definitely not as crazy as the 16-bit games, which makes this game feel quite tame in comparison. But it's still fun. Rocket Knight deserves another (more ambitious) sequel. I should try playing the first Genesis game again but I find it pretty hard but I really like the ideas from the 16-bit games and wish that Rocket Knight had been more successful.
