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Mega Man ZX Review - DS

Introduction

Ah, Mega Man. The odd, little, blue robot man has been around for nearly as long as I have. After disappearing from the radar for a while, he resurfaced in a brand-new anime series. And what does the resurgence of an old video game character into a TV show mean? More video games. Enter MegamanZX, a title that has finally graced our humble shores for the DS.

I’ll say this right off the bat to spare me any embarrassment that’s sure to occur later on in this review: I’ve never played a Mega Man title before this one. As such, I’ll be looking at this game not as “the next in a series”, but rather as a standalone game.

Gameplay

Mega Man ZX is primarily a side-scrolling shooter with some minor RPG elements. And by minor, I do mean minor, but I'll get to that later. The main gameplay consists of running through levels and shooting just about everything in sight of your trusty arm cannon. Enemies come in all shapes and sizes and require different amounts of firepower to take down. So far, it's your standard meat and two veg in video game form. Unfortunately, that's pretty much where the innovation starts and ends. Rather than allow you at least five shooting angles (left, right, up, up-left, up-right), shooting is limited to left and right only. Jumping and firing also works, but that's it. The fact that such a basic set of moves is completely missing begs the question as to why they're gone. If Capcom did it purely to increase the challenge of completing the game, then they failed abysmally: it just makes it more annoying.

Furthermore on the point of annoying features is the fact that there's absolutely no sense of achievement when progressing through the areas. Enemies that you've dealt with in one area will appear almost instantaneously: simply leaving the frame and re-entering it will cause the enemies to respawn. Yes, that's right: enemies will reappear without you even having to leave the area. When I first played this, it was understandably weird to backtrack a few steps and find that the enemies I had just taken out had reappeared somehow. There's not even some snappy teleport effect or something to show the enemies reappearing: they're simply there again when you enter the frame. This seriously hampers the amount of enjoyment you get out of this title, as it seems like your efforts in the game are incredibly futile, unlike titles like Metal Slug and similar.

The game utilises a mission based system in order to progress. Players can use special terminals in order to accept missions and report on completed ones. You generally have a variety of different missions to accomplish and you're free to choose whichever one you like. However, choosing a mission that requires a certain Biometal element to proceed is a futile affair, as you'll simply end up at the entrance to (continued next page)