![]() Powerful modifier chips are hidden and guarded throughout the adventure, allowing you to customize the Moonrider’s fighting style while gaining killer advantages and abilities.īEAUTIFUL PIXEL GRAPHICS COMPLEMENTED BY AN INCREDIBLE SOUNDTRACK The design of Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider puts the best classic action-game elements in the laser-precise sights of its starring ninja, ensuring snappy, responsive combat that’s supremely challenging. GEAR UP AND PREPARE TO BATTLE YOUR CREATORS Conceived as a tool to preserve the totalitarian state, the Moonrider instead rejects its intended purpose and wages a relentless battle for vengeance against its creators and fellow super soldiers. ![]() After building an army of super soldiers as weapons of war, the authoritarians unwittingly seal their own fates by bringing online the ninja warrior known as Moonrider. In the oppressed world of Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider, humanity finds an unlikely hero. ![]() Moonrider’s adventure likely won’t linger with you, but I don’t regret playing the short, familiar, and satisfying experience.Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider is a side-scrolling action platformer that channels the golden age of classic 16-bit action games in a full-throttle quest for revenge. By the time you start feeling like you’ve completed a full retro meal, credits are right around the corner and I appreciate it for that. In this way, it knows exactly what it is: a brief but enjoyable nostalgic experience that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Making your way to the last level and defeating the final boss only takes a few hours. One of the best things going for Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider is its length. I found two early on that I never unequipped. I enjoyed these as rewards for exploring off the main path, but some are undeniably more useful than others. Hidden upgrades, like a double jump or the ability to become stronger the more enemies you defeat, can also be found in every level and can optionally be equipped. The mechanic is a familiar one but it works, and it’s exciting to try out your new tornado weapon, or my favorite, a tentacle that ejects from a portal. Taking inspiration from Mega Man, after clearing the first level, the other six can be pursued in any order, and defeating its boss rewards you with a new weapon. Levels are hard, but achievable thanks to reasonable lives and checkpoints, and bosses have patterns that can be tracked and exploited, but probably not on your first attempt. Thankfully, Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider finds a good balance. More importantly, however, I enjoyed them as much as the standard platforming.ĭifficulty is often a shortcoming for comparable games, with many emphasizing challenge over fun. These levels toe a difficult line of looking like they could have existed on a 16-bit console, but I am almost certain they couldn’t. To zoom out would make it feel too much like a modern game, but I don’t know if it was worth the Genesis-era accuracy to be occasionally annoyed.Īlong with the jumping and sword action, which accounts for most of the game, there are a handful of motorcycle levels. He feels great to move, but some annoying shortcomings appear where you can’t see your next platform due to the camera limitations. Moonrider moves well, bounces off walls like Samus Aran, and sprints to leap over large chasms. The story is secondary, however, to the platforming and sword action. I also appreciated the little bits of personality injected into every boss before beginning the fight. ![]() For most of the experience, I wondered if I was the bad guy and enjoyed Moonrider’s soliloquies about how unrestricted power isn’t appropriate for anyone, no matter how noble their intentions. You break out of your container and destroy the guards in a violent display that would have made you grateful your parents weren't watching had you been playing it on your Genesis in 1992. In Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider, you are the titular Moonrider. Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider won’t go down in history as one of the greats that both embraces the past and modernizes the action, but I would place it closer to the fantastic side of the scale, even if it doesn’t quite make it all the way. Some are fantastic, some are too hard to be enjoyable, but most land somewhere in the middle. ![]() I count myself among the group of video game players who welcome efforts from small development teams that play to our nostalgia for an era where playing video games meant tuning to channel 3. Retro platformers are not hard to come by. ![]()
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