Break time’s over, Mega Man. It’s been more than eight years since the release of Mega Man 10, but Capcom is finally giving us a new entry in the 2D action-platformer franchise. Mega Man 11 comes out on October 2 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC (I played the PS4 version).
- Mega Man 11 is the latest game in the Mega Man star series which blends classic challenging with action with new graphics style. Mega Man 11 comes in 2.5D graphics which displays beautifully hand-drawn characters with a great environment. In the game, you can take an enemy’s characteristics by defeating it.
- Mega Man 11 Review And CONTENT For THIS GAME Mega Man 11 is always the same – eight levels, each presided over by a boss with a particular weapon and the possibility of dealing with them in the order that the user prefers.
I love Mega Man. The character has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, going back to memories of playing the Nintendo Entertainment System (or watching my older brother play) in the basement. But my love goes beyond nostalgia. I still play them all the time. Mega Man 3, which came out in 1990 for NES, remains my favorite video game ever. The combination of precision platforming with gun-based action has always hooked me, and Mega Man’s cartoon-future aesthetic continues to tickle my imagination.
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So, yeah, I was pretty excited for Mega Man 11. But while Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 tapped into nostalgia by being games that played and looked like Mega Man 2, Mega Man 11 is a more modern title. The action still takes place in a 2D plane, but the characters and levels are made up of 3D models and backgrounds. And for the first time in what seems like forever, Mega Man has a major new gameplay feature. The Double Gear system can slow down time or empower your weapons, but relying on it too much can overheat it and make both functions unavailable for some time.
Mega Man 11 Demo
Mega Man 11 doesn’t have to change video games, though, and it doesn’t have to inspire a new legion of followers. It just has to be as honest and good as it is. This game was reviewed on Nintendo. The new gimmick for Mega Man 11 is the double-gear system. You can slow down time or increase your damage for a short period of time, giving you new ways to defeat enemies or complete puzzles.
Mega Man 11 has to balance between providing the classic jump-and-shoot gameplay that fans like me love while introducing these new elements. And it manages to walk that line without stumbling.
Above: Block Man’s level has a lot of … bricks. I guess you can call them blocks.
What you’ll like
Classic Mega Man
Despite the new look, Mega Man has the same precision you’d expect from the series. He doesn’t build up momentum or need time to come to a full stop, like Mario does. Not that there’s anything wrong with that system, and it serves the 2D Mario formula (which focuses on pure platforming). But Mega Man also has a lot of shooting and dodging, so it’s important that you can move your hero quickly and precisely. Sometimes, a single pixel is the difference between safety and death.
Retaining those basic controls goes a long way toward making Mega Man 11 feel as good the series’ best games. It also has a lot of the other elements fans love about the franchise. You can choose to fight the first eight levels and bosses in any order you want. Each boss gives you a new weapon, and every one of these foes has at least one weakness that you can exploit for easier kills. You also have your robot dog, Rush, available to help out. He can turn into a spring that can help you reach high places (and, after you beat the first four bosses, he can turn into a jet that lets you fly for a short while).
This stuff is like comfort food for the Mega Man fan’s soul. It’s familiar, but it works and comes together to deliver that special brand of 2D action that the franchise excels at.
Above: Using the Double Gear system to make attacks stronger. Also admire my trophy.
Double Gear System
The Double Gear System gives Mega Man 11 its big new feature. Pressing one shoulder button can slow down time with the Speed Gear, making it easier to avoid obstacles. Pressing another shoulder button makes all of your weapons stronger — including the ones you earn from bosses — via the Power Gear. But you can’t just use the abilities as much as you want. For starters, you can only activate one at a time. When one is on, it begins to fill up a heating bar. If you overheat, you won’t be able to use either ability for some time.
This system adds some variety to the classic Mega Man formula. The Speed Gear isn’t just a safety net. Many levels and bosses have abilities that are so hard to dodge, it’s clear you should be using the Speed Gear to help avoid them. Juggling between the Power and Speed Gears and making sure to not overheat adds an extra layer of complexity that helps give Mega Man 11 an identity beyond being another nostalgic retread.
Above: The backgrounds are awesome.
Memorable stages and bosses
Mega Man fights bad robots, and they always have a theme: Fire Man, Ice Man, and so on. After all these games, you’d think it would be hard to come up with any strong ideas. And, sure, we do sometimes end up with the umpteenth variation on “Water-based Robot Man.” Yet Mega Man 11 has a lot of creative bosses.
But you need to see their levels and the bosses themselves in action to understand why they’re special. Torch Man, for example, sounds like just another Fire-based robot. But his level has a summer camp theme that makes him stand out from being just another guy that shoots fire and lava. Tundra Man, too, escapes the fate of redundancy thanks to his natural history museum-themed level and his figure skating-based fighting abilities.
Above: Run, Mega Man!
Difficulty options
Mega Man 11 has four difficulty options: newcomer, casual, normal, and superhero. I’m pretty familiar with the series, so I was comfortable starting with normal mode. But I’m glad Capcom has given newer or lapsed players a way to play through the adventure. Newcomer and casual provide the same game as the normal experience, but you take less damage per hit, and stages have more checkpoints. Yes, it’s easier, but it won’t make you feel like the game is grabbing your hand and dragging you to victory.
Superhero mode, meanwhile, is great for someone like me who wants an extra challenge after beating the normal difficulty. It doesn’t just change damage values. Bosses have new augmented abilities and patterns that make them tougher, and items like E-Tanks (which refill your health) and extra lives that usually litter stages are gone. Enemies also stop dropping items that refill your health and ammo. It’s a big challenge, but it’s one that I’m excited to keep working on.
Above: You get bolts pretty easily.
What you won’t like
An overpowered in-game store
Since Mega Man 7, the series has an in-game store that sells you items that can give you new abilities or passive powers (like reducing how much you recoil when taking a hit), but they also offer things like extra lives and E-Tanks. You could abuse these stores in past games by revisiting old levels and repeatedly killing enemies, which sometimes drop the bolts you need to buy these items.
In Mega Man 11, bolts drop so often that you don’t even need to farm them. Just by playing through the game, I had enough bolts to quickly buy every upgrade. I was also able to max out my lives and E-Tanks. This hurts the challenge of the game. Boss fights become trivial when you have so many E-Tanks that you can just keep refilling your health. You don’t focus on strategy when you can just brute force your way through a fight. Who cares if you take a bunch of hits when you can keep giving yourself more health?
This especially becomes a problem during the Dr. Wily levels. These stages are traditionally the hardest in the series. You access them after beating the eight Robot Masters. Usually, you have to beat every Wily stage in a row. If you run out of lives on the last one, you have to go back to the first. That might seem harsh, but the difficulty boost makes those levels more exciting and rewarding to beat. In Mega Man 11, not only can you save your progress after you beat every Wily level, but you can go back to the shop and keep maxing out your supply of lives and E-Tanks.
Above: What a horrible night to have a curse.
Short Dr. Wily section
Speaking of the Dr. Wily levels, Mega Man 11 doesn’t have many of them. You have two that are traditional levels with their own bosses, one that has you fighting the eight Robot Masters again, and one for the final confrontation with Dr. Wily himself.
That’s four total Wily levels, with only two of them feeling like proper stages. Compare that to Mega Man 2, which has six Dr. Wily stages.
Above: Don’t look back.
Conclusion
While I wish that the in-game store was better balanced and that we had more Dr. Wily levels, Mega Man 11 still does an excellent job of keeping what makes the series great while adding — mainly through the Double Gear system — just enough to make it feel fresh. The multiple difficulty options make Mega Man 11 more accessible to new players, but the superhero challenge will give veterans a real test of skill.
Mega Man 11 shows that the franchise doesn’t need to just be a nostalgia act. Beyond the new gameplay features, the 3D visuals help enrich the experience. It’s a beautiful game with background and character animation that — while I do love that retro look — you couldn’t do with 8-bit sprites. The new look still captures the simple, cartoon-like feel of the original Mega Man, but the colors are richer and the shapes are softer.
If you’re a fan of Mega Man but feel uneasy about how Mega Man 11 looks or adds to the formula, don’t. This is a fantastic 2D action game worthy of the Blue Bomber’s name.
Score:90/100
Mega Man 11 Giant Bomb
Mega Man 11 comes out on October 2 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC. Capcom gave us a PS4 code for this review.
PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch
| Description: | |
Fueled by bitter recollections of his rivalry with Dr. Light, the nefarious Dr. Wily revives his Double Gear invention and turns eight of Light's newest robots evil. It's once again up to Mega Man to set things right by defeating these reprogrammed robots and using their weapons against each other. | |
| Review: | |
Don't let the number fool you. This may be the eleventh or twelfth central Mega Man title. It may be backed by several spin-off series. Yet it's been nearly a decade since the last full-blown game in the series. Even then, Mega Man 9 and 10 were deliberate throwbacks, built to resemble the old NES games that made Mega Man such a hit. Mega Man 11 is CAPCOM's big return to the character, a would-be comeback that lays all cards on the table and does its best to build a classic Mega Man for the modern era. It's a game caught in the middle, balancing a new look and new ideas with a model that hasn't really changed since 1987. And should it really change? Mega Man's basic idea remains superb: take on levels in any order, get a new weapon upon defeating the boss, and experiment with it in other stages. Even so, Mega Man must evolve somehow, and Mega Man 11 pushes things in new directions. For one thing, Mega Man 11 tries to summon a jot of sympathy for longtime antagonist Dr. Wily. In an opening flashback we see him young and angry but not yet a villain—he's just upset that Dr. Light, future creator of Mega Man, shot down his idea and stole his spotlight. The memory inspires present-day Wily to revive that idea, the Double Gear system, and abduct Dr. Light's latest crop of robots. Mega Man sets off to battle these evilly reprogrammed machines, and Light grants him a Double Gear setup of his own. Mega Man 11 seems fully into tradition at first. Everything looks polished and is technically 3-D, but our hero leaps and shoots through stages in typical 2-D side-scrolling fashion. The Double Gear hatches two new concepts, however: the Speed Gear slows down everything, ala Viewtiful Joe, to give players more time in tight spots, while the Power Gear grants Mega Man extra-destructive weapons. Neither gear's effects last for long, though, and turning on both at once leaves Mega Man briefly vulnerable. Both gears are helpful in navigating levels, particularly when the game whips rapid projectiles your way, but they're not essential to making it through Dr. Wily's hordes. The real change in Mega Man 11 is subtler: it's toughened up a lot. The eight robot masters' levels are all longer than those of prior games, with a good distance in between checkpoints. And they're much more challenging. Enemies are cunning in their positions and attacks, Mega Man takes damage easily, and instant death often arises from bottomless pits or more vicious hazards. Robo-dog Rush is on hand as a springboard and a jet, but his energy depletes fast. Mega Man games always rewarded memorizing attacks and having the reflexes to evade them, but it's acutely demanding this time around, as though Mega Man 11 styled itself less on side-scrollers and more on bullet-dodging shooters with no mercy for errors. Players may feel forced to use the Power or Speed Gears, but Mega Man 11 is more intent on pushing them to a lab run by Dr. Light, Roll, and Auto. Such a shop appeared in some previous Mega Man games, but here it's almost essential to getting anywhere. The longer levels seem too much to survive with Mega Man's default three lives, so you'd better buy more from Dr. Light. The same goes for damage-lessening parts, items that auto-charge your stock Mega Buster, and, of course, energy tanks that completely refill Mega Man's life meter. The E-tanks were a tricky part of Mega Man titles ever since the third game let you stock a bunch, and here they're the player's biggest decision in the game: do you fill up on energy tanks and lives, which is easily done given the game's generous supply of bolts from defeated enemies? Or do you ignore these extras, play cautiously, and die over and over until you get it right? It helps that Mega Man 11's stages are worth the trouble. The expanded levels allow the designers to experiment, and each has at least one large and challenging mid-boss. It's all a mix of old ideas with new ones. Acid Man's stage has underwater physics and familiar profusions of spikes, but it throws in a dizzying whirlpool sub-boss and foes whose projectiles gradually turn water toxic. Bounce Man's level recalls both Clown Man and Spring Man, but its candy-colored rubber rooms are a lot of fun to navigate until the bottomless pits appear. And then there's Torch Man's level, which has some delightful background gags (with Mets on a camping trip) but launches into a giant flashfire race that might be the nastiest trick the series has pulled since Quick Man's lasers in Mega Man 2. These levels show off many mechanized enemies, though Mega Man 11 also falls into the series' bad habit of overusing the least interesting foes. You'll occasionally see certain highly creative robots like a cookpot tank piloted by a mecha-potato, but there's no end to the mid-air flower bombs that stay invisible and invincible until you're near. The game also loves to bring out Gabyoall, the spiky, ground-hugging sentries that were irritating and ubiquitous even in the original Mega Man. At times the game's difficulty seems unintentional, particularly in the boss battles. The robot masters of Mega Man 11 play dirtier than their predecessors—they'll often switch to new Gear attacks or change form halfway through the battle, and some are tough even when you know their weaknesses. The problem comes from the game bombarding the screen with effects. Mega Man 11 looks nice enough in its “2.5-D” style, but sometimes it's hard to tell just what can damage you in a blur of crackling electricity or bursting flame. Mega Man's clashes with robot masters can be the most memorable moments in any piece of the series, and here the battles are inventive, fast-paced, and…confusing. Some boss fights feel cramped when confined to a single screen, and by their nature the game's polygon graphics are never as simple and precise as old NES games. Even so, the bosses reward the player. Each weapon you'll receive is useful and ripe for experimentation. No mere straightforward projectiles, Mega Man's weapons now change his appearance and maneuvers on-screen, and each has a secondary form granted by the Power Gear or Speed Gear. Switching weapons forces you to consider just how, for example, the Pile Driver hurls Mega Man forward, or how the Acid Barrier won't let you fire shots until it forms protective shields. For their part, the bosses are well-designed, from Blast Man's explosion hairstyle to Tundra Man's Frozen ponytail to Block Man's resemblance to Vincent from The Black Hole. I can't be the only one who sees that. The challenging, lengthy original eight stages almost make up for a lacking endgame. Wily's fortress is at first a taxing array of gears and skulls that forces you to use all weapons craftily, but it might be the shortest Wily stronghold in Mega Man history. Of the four stages, only two are of decent length and feature new bosses (if you count a certain over-used golem as new), and the other two levels are short and predictable. Mega Man games lost the ability to truly surprise us after the second one made us think Wily was an alien for a few minutes, but Mega Man 11 doesn't even try to mix up its big finale. Nor does it go for Astro Boy parables about obsolete robots as Mega Man 9 did. Whether pushing itself too hard or fading at the finish line,Mega Man 11 understands what makes the series so appealing. The graphics highlight the charming, cartoon-eyed style of older games, the soundtrack is solid with a few neat hooks, and the cutscenes don't run on for too long despite their insistence on giving Auto plenty of lines. Its style comes off as Mega Man 8 with much better voice acting and fewer bizarre one-off characters. Mega Man 11 doesn't alter the fundamental flow of the series so much as bulk it up, making players work harder one way or another for every bit of progress. Perhaps that's a deliberate attempt to harness nostalgia, to make the players feel as though they're kids rejoicing in every robot master they beat and every new weapon they acquire. Manipulative? Yes, but it fits a game that wants to be classic Mega Man at any price. All nostalgia aside, Mega Man 11 is an engaging return to form. If its graphics occasionally confuse and its difficulty curve occasionally turns sadistic, it's all forgiven in the better moments and satisfying triumphs. It's faithful to everything that made Mega Man a success, and it's willing to change just enough to stay interesting. Mega Man 11 even makes one look forward to Mega Man 12, and for a series so stuffed with sequels and spin-offs and sequels to spin-offs, that's a high achievement. |
| Grade: | |
Overall : B Sound/Music : B+ Presentation : B + Clever stages and fun weapons often capture Mega Man at his old-school finest | |
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