Overall 9.4 Graphics 9 Sound 8 Addictive 10 Depth 9 Difficulty 6
9.3
Simple, but amazingly fun! Boxia
If you're into the hacking scene, chances are you've played more than your fair share of Mega Man hacks. If that's so, you may have noticed that most of these hacks (at least the decent ones) revolve around a set of certain gimmicks to keep you interested. A few hacks, however, decide to revolve around just one core gimmick that works surprisingly well: a never-ending game. These games are of the "endless" series, hacks of Mega Man games modelled after Mega Man 9s endless mode. Endless entails that these games are made up of sets of random, pre-designed levels with bosses thrown in every few dozen screens. Rock man 4 Endless is one of these hacks, and its fairly simplistic foundation may shock you when you first play it. Let's take a closer look.
Story: N/A
There is absolutely no story. No carbon copy of Mega Man 4s story, no new twists, nothing. It's a little disappointing that there couldn't be any cool additions to spice the game up, but there are much better parts of the game.
Gameplay: 9/10
The game plays largely like Mega Man 4. You run around 8-bit stages shooting up foes, navigating the area, and trying not to die. However, there are also some new challenges and mechanics thrown into the mix to spice up this show. There are new levels to traverse, new modes to test your luck, and a new mechanic known as "screens". A screen is the size of a typical segment of a level in a Mega Man game, though large segments may make contain several screens. Your goal is to traverse as many screens as possible without dying. After you finish a screen or a group of screens, you will travel by via teleportation to the next screen or set of screens. Remember that the game is endless, so you can still keep playing even if you get the max number of countable screens. That feat is very difficult, however, since the difficulty manages to constitute a huge obstacle.
Level Design: 10/10
This is a type of game that leans VERY heavily on Level Design. For an endless game to appeal to anyone, the levels have to be interesting, engaging, and challenging. This game manages to accomplish that very, very well. There are three kinds of levels in this game: new levels, returning levels, and boss levels. For returning levels, only the best levels from Mega Man 4 have returned, mostly from the castle stages, blending perfectly with the new levels. Seriously, these two kinds of levels have such similar difficulty and design you'd almost swear they were from one game! The boss levels are largely recycled, but still prove to be an interesting and thoroughly fun feature.
Graphics: 9/10
There's something very unique about this game. That is the fact that this game cleaned up the graphical glitches in vanilla,
and didn’t bring in new ones! That's something i have yet to see from any other Mega Man hack. Sprites are fluid and without flickering, textures are consistent, and everything just looks crisp. In short, the graphics are like Mega Man 4 without all the glitches. It's not totally perfect, however. Some of the new levels are designed with bland new pallets, like all black. It looks cool, but it's not very easy on the eyes and lacks in creativity.
Music & Sound Effects: 8/10
There is only one problem i can find with the music - all of it's from Vanilla. This isn't so bad with the old levels, since the track covers those levels perfectly, but some of the new levels got tracks that just seem.....off. For example, a new level designed with pallets from Cossack 3 have Cossack 1s' theme playing. Maybe it's a glitch, but it feels weird with such a mix-up. The sound effects suit their assigned triggers well, and i have yet to find any glitches with them. I guess all that can be said about the effects is that they work well.
Challenges: 10/10
If you ever get bored of shooting up foes and hopping over bottomless pits in normal mode, you have two other modes to turn to. There's unarmed mode, in which all you have is your Mega Buster, and you cannot collect any of the special weapons. This turns out to be a serious disadvantage in some levels where you're getting swarmed by enemies that would otherwise be a breeze to brush off. Alas, you can get used to it rather quickly and enjoy it. The third mode is Near-death mode, in which you have only one bar of health meaning if you get hit once, you're dead. You have to learn how to dance around bullets and shoot sparingly, allocating for both the time to dodge and attack. If you can do so successfully, the satisfaction level is amped up to eleven as you feel like a huge badass with your untouchable self. In short, there's always a challenge to turn to in this game if you get bored of another one.
Collectables & Hidden Goodies: N/A.
1-ups and E-tanks are disabled in every mode (except for the latter, which can rarely be found in normal mode). I wouldn't criticise much if it wasn't for the fact that there were so many possibilities for new items. Items, power-ups, and new weapons all could have been scattered around the game. If this had been done, i think there would have been a lot more feel to the levels.
Total Depth: 9/10
There is only one thing that keeps this category from being 10 out of 10. As mentioned above, there are no collectables. This isn't too big a beef, but i think there could have been a bit more flavour to the stages if they had hidden stuff. Otherwise, there are biblical amounts of levels here. New, old, they all combine into one to offer one never-ending challenge that helps radiate an addictive atmosphere. You may never truly visit all of this game’s levels and that helps to create an enticing and mysterious feeling. That's sheer brilliance.
Overall: 9.3/10
This is one of the most competent Mega Man hacks I’ve ever played. It's insanely addictive, huge, and packs great graphics and music. Despite serving disappointment in the fields of story and collectables, it's an absolute must play for anyone looking for a good platformer that'll keep them entertained for a while.
Graphics 9 Sound 8 Addictive 10 Depth 9 Difficulty 6
Review Rating: 4.3/5
Submitted: 09-05-14
Review Replies: 1
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