Mighty No. 9 (PC) Review

It's almost surreal watching Beck flail his arms around as he sloppily races across a city under robotic siege in the opening stage. The chaos of the situation is only accentuated by the shoddily rendered explosions in the background that look more like burnt pasta sauce than actual explosions.

The opening introduces the basic mechanics Mighty No. 9 works off of. General movement and shooting plays like typical Mega Man fare, if Mega Man were incapable of cohesive control. Beck is responsive enough where movement is possible, but there's no weight to his actions. Jumping and running are too floaty for a platformer; there's no thought behind the way Beck moves.

The floatiness is only worsened by Beck's dash. Dashing allows him to gain a little attribute boost from a weakened enemy if he dashes through or near them. The dash is also used to progress over bottomless pits or under walls, making sure Beck doesn't just run right and shoot until he reaches the boss door.

To say the dash clashes with the level design of Mighty No. 9 implies that the design is well thought out. Instead of being creative and attempting to design levels that redefine the three-decade-old genre, Comcept plays it safe, sticking to classic design elements that are now severely out of date. Wind pushing the player character and ice making them slippery are nice in the games that established those elements years ago, but a 2016 platformer has no excuse just adhering to those simplistic choices.

The dash does absolutely nothing to change how platforming works, and it's baffling considering it would have worked perfectly as a speed boost had it also worked as an attack. As is, the dash is a stop in gameplay to jitter into enemies Beck has to stop to shoot and then dash into to properly kill. The dash can't be ignored, either, since enemies take an absurd amount of damage to kill without using it.

Mighty No. 9 wants so badly to be the next Mega Man, going as far to copy its gameplay elements to a T. Beck starts in an opening stage that establishes eight robots going haywire and rogue. He must then choose between eight stages where he does the bare minimum of platforming, all while desperately trying to remind the audience just how much like Mega Man he is. Afterwards, he fights a boss, gets a new weapon, and the cycle repeats until the credits roll and the nightmare ends.

The most unforgivable aspect of Mighty No. 9, however, is its $4,000,000 budget. With that much funding, there's absolutely no excuse for how underwhelming and weak the whole package is. The Mega Man homages outstay their welcome fast, and feel more like blatant ripping off of a beloved franchise than anything else. The design is embarrassingly simple without any new ideas or polish to make it enjoyable. Its only redeeming quality is its very existence being a reminder that countless Mega Man games exist and can be played instead at any point.