I preface this review by thanking Garbi for recommending this game to me because it might be the worst game I have ever played.
Introduction
Rocman X is a 2D platformer developed and published unofficially for the Famicom in Japan in 1995. The game is considered to be a demake of Mega Man X which was released one year prior for the SNES in all territories, however I consider this game to be completely different from Mega Man X because they are designed different and are only the same in name only. Demakes are games which are remade for previous generation consoles and was very prevalent during the SNES lifetime where a lot of unlicensed companies would turn SNES into NES games. Quite often, these games were of a poor quality because the companies simply did not have the experience with the hardware or simply tried to do too much on lower powered hardware. Famous instances of demakes including Super Mario World NES and Donkey Kong Country 4 and quite often the names of the games were changed to have higher numbers after them, so that they could avoid lawsuits with Nintendo.
Gameplay
I will flat out say that this game is in fact the worst game that I have ever played because everything about the game is either broken, doesn’t make sense or so glitchy that making progress is almost impossible. I will go on record and say I could only play this game for 15 minutes and I couldn’t get past stage 1 and it is rare that I am this honest, but this is a game that was so frustrating from the outset that I could not stomach playing it for very long.
The first thing is the level design which whilst on the surface seems ok, there is a major glitch in the game where because of the way that the game scrolls, the graphics at the edges are glitchy and it makes getting through the stages extremely difficult down to the fact that I could not see what was coming up. Sometimes as well, there was occasions where the way that the levels were designed, I couldn’t progress because I would hit a brick wall literally and I simply could not decipher where to go next. The first jump in the game is the prime example of this because I assumed I could jump across the gap, but in fact there is a way to do it which is so complex and stupid that I cannot remember how to do it. That is the problem is the game is designed is so poorly especially with enemy placement that it literally drove me crazy trying to get anywhere in any of the levels. The major problem with the game is that they tried to squeeze a lot of things that would fit comfortably on a SNES controller onto a NES controller and that is why literally nothing works in my opinion. I think that the developers tried to be too ambitious here and instead affected the quality of the control scheme as a whole, which alongside everything else wrong with the game is just another thorn in the side of this dreadful game
Finally, the graphics are glitchy and the game runs so poorly that sometimes there were times where I felt it would have been better if the game was running backwards as the framerate might be the most inconsistent that I have ever seen in any game I have reviewed so far. Even Cheetahmen II, which is a game that was never originally finished and was developed 3 years prior to this game ran at a smoother framerate and that game really does not run very well at all. The problem for me is that this game could have looked so much better and played so much nicer if the developers had of been much more realistic with the game and perhaps made their own version of the game rather than trying too hard to emulate the SNES version
Conclusion
This game is the new worst game that I have ever played because the previous worst, Color A Dinosaur at least functioned like it should have done, whilst this game is nothing short of a masterpiece of sheer disaster. There is nothing about this game that I don’t even remotely like and I think that the developers literally tried to cash in on the franchise, but instead failed spectacularly. I simply despise this game with a passion and I will be deleting this game from my library as I have no intentions of ever retrying the game or giving it a second chance because the game does not deserve it.
0/10
Copyright ©2018 Liam Piper. All Images Used Under Fair Use
LiamPiper 