Junkman
Dec 13 2004, 05:42 AM
Game: Megakid X 3: Double Defence
Creator: JK Games
Genre: Platformer
Description: Kitty has disrupted a robot tournament by making the contestants go berserk. Help Megakid X and his pal Double Zero defeat Kitty's contraptions and Kitty himself.

Rating: 55%

Review: Mega Man games have always been quite a tricky thing for me to tackle. Even though the Mega Man games broke records for having the most uninspired and beaten to death theme, story and characters, damn these games were fun to play. I remember all these moments I spent in my childhood shooting fiendish robots down to pieces or watching my brother do so (He was quite the Mega Man fanatic indeed) and never actually getting bored of it. The challenge level, the variety of bosses and all the cool weapons you got to shoot baddies with always ensured that no Mega Man game could be considered as being sub-par. Unfortunately, this South Park adaptation of Capcom's landmark games falls a bit flat.

The basic Mega Man element that this game does best is the story and theme, unfortunately. The story isn't quite the best thing since sliced bread but it is pretty typical of the Mega Man games (It seems like a crossover between Mega Man 5 and Mega Man 6, accordingly). In order to celebrate Kitty's defeat, a robot tournament is organized in South Park. However, the robots unleashed in the tournament are nothing less than Kitty's minions (who's back from the dead after having been killed twice, but he still is no match for Dr.Wily's astounding 6 deaths) and chaos ensues. Megakid must stop Kitty once again but luckily, his pal Double Zero is there to help our hero busting through the game's 6 levels. Each of the characters got 3 of the levels to bust through, each containing a various landscape and enemies.

Even though level design is better than in the previous MegaKid X games, it's still poor. Luckily, levels don't consist anymore of series of platforms hardly tied in together but they don't offer much to the player. Levels are incredibly short and feature close to no enemies at all, plus the few enemies you need to battle hardly are challenging since enemies either stay idle and shoot at you (only though they have an insane health amount) and the few moving enemies don't fare much better since they're hardly aggressive. Boss battles do fare better than in previous MegaKid X games, although they still need work. Most of the bosses follow preset patterns and they spend most of the time floating in midair shooting stuff at you. Some of the bosses do introduce interesting twists, such as a wall of mines slowly closing in toward you, menacing to blow you off, should you take too much time to eliminate him and Gemini Stan who dishes out a clone of himself to battle you off. The main problem with the boss battles is the lack of challenge involved in the fights themselves. Most of the bosses have a weakness and considering the amount of weapons in the game, it doesn't take long to find it out and once you do, you can kill even the final bosses of the game in less than 10 seconds. This makes most of the bosses to be beaten easily without having any skill or strategy, thus making bosses somewhat of a letdown. One of the few noteworthy boss battles would be Ring Cartman, since he doesn't seem to have a weak point like his peers and you'll actually need to think to beat him. However, most of the bosses go through the easy route and aren't pretty thrilling.

Graphics are pretty mixed up. Whilst the character graphics look good and do feature some animation, most of the other graphics are a real mess. There's virtually no backgrounds, most of the enemy characters and devices found through the levels look pretty bad and aren't animated at all. Sound effects are the usual The Games Factory fare (although none of the sound effects are misused) whilst music come in form of MIDIs pulled straight from some of the Mega Man X games, thus providing an appropriate soundtrack for the action.

MegaKid X 3: Double Defence is the best game that appeared out of the MegaKid X series, but it ultimately falls a bit flat. I obviously don't expect such a game to be on par with the Mega Man games but as a stand alone project in which you dive in without any pre-conceived notions that tie it to a Mega Man game, it just isn't that good. There are too many gameplay elements in this title which fall short due to their clumsiness or glitches that pervade them to make the game better than just average. It offers a few entertaining moments there and there which do save it from failure and the game manages to be fun most of the time. Just don't go in it expecting anything spectacular, though. It would be interesting to see what would happen if another game of this series got released, though. Seeing how there's been improvement over every game of the series, maybe the next game of the series would be pretty good.