"The Dark Souls of Shooting Games"

92 Recca is part of the summer carnival 'series' of caravan shooters. It is overall a similiar feeling game to Naxat's other carnival game Alzadick (though not as good but comparing nes to Turbo CD is stupid) in that it has three modes that each have their own variety. The first and second game modes are similiar level structure and the third is quite different. This is very much a panic shooter. Yep, a NES panic shooter XD

The mechanics of this game are Gradius styled 'power up your power up by being consistent' (what you pick up) With exception of Cho Ren Sha, I generally dont like this mechanic. i dont like it here either because Recca is extremely fast paced and 'slippery' as is so a hard game is made even harder. I could never really live more than 30 seconds anyway so didnt make a difference.

The other mechanic is energy shield that can be spewed forth as a plasma barrage. This means shooting must stop to power up (which means your score stops increasing, which is contradictive of caravan) HOWEVER, a player can assassinate some bosses quickly with a little practice, so it does have some utility, but its very risky to use and the range is very short so requires impeccable timing, shot placement and finesse, as well as knowledge of a boss and their movements. It also doesnt stop kamikazes, laser or certain other projectiles.

Level structure consists of rapid scrolling cool looking (but awful distracting) backgrounds, and fast paced old school waves/lines swarms of drones. More variety consists in flavors of tougher enemies, projectile enemies (lasers, bullets). Bosses show up about every 1.5 minutes and can be elimited in 20-30 seconds if assassinated correctly. Some just arent fair though as far as i can tell. And many of them are recycled or have 'off pattern' variations...

The soundtrack is a somewhat repetivie acid house thing. It sounds like the kind of drummy konami stuff from the era. (Like plenty of games NES sound channels fill up and it start skipping, unfortunately.)

palette is limited but nice contrast, bright. mostly pink and blue. Compared to most games the flicker isnt bad (only one boss has something). Overall this game looks very impressive for nes and even has a wide variety of video effects you generally do not see games attempt to do. Even if you hate this game any Nes fan will appreciate the wide range of movement this game has to offer.

Difficulty is batshit insane. I manged to make some progress into level two (it felt like a miracle) After about 10 mins hitting a bottlneck I happily turned on the Game Genie.

With exception of Guardian Legend... I dont especially like the NES for shooters when given the option of other systems but this is still neat in that its caravan styled shooter and pushes NES hardware further than most games. the plasma barrage assination gimmick is also kind of cool. Caravan arent designed to be 'won' but this game is ludicrously difficult. it also has an ending.

Worth a look if you are NES academic or hunt caravan. but imo there are plenty of better shooters (and more fun) than this.