Berserk Boy is the latest in a long line of Metroidvania platformers to try and capture the pure retro feel of Mega Man and its contemporaries. Happily, it pretty much hits the bullseye.
The backstory is your basic mad scientist fare, where the bad guy wants to use Dark Energy powers to take over the world. You play as Kei, young soldier who meets a talking owl called Fiore, who leads you to a strange orb which grants you powers and abilities and the adventure begins.
Gameplay-wise we're very much in Mega Man territory, with the classic Metroidvania tropes of defeating enemies while exploring the map, using new abilities to unlock areas and so on. But this isn't just exploration - as you unlock new abilities you find yourself able to chain multiple attacks together in order to build up your Berserk meter, which lets you really let rip with special attacks.
The key focus here is melee combat - you're not hanging back and taking pot-shots but rather you're right in the thick of it. And that's one of the things that really makes this game fun; you'll find yourself moving around faster and faster to get the perfect sequence before hitting the big moves. The speed and smoothness give the game almost a Sonic the Hedgehog feel, where you're bouncing from enemy to enemy and seeking out more victims on every screen.
The graphics are very much in keeping with the retro theme: bright and colourful with big chunky sprites that would fit perfectly on the SNES. And the excellent music comes from Tee Lopes, who wrote much of the music for Sonic Mania and TMNT: Shredder's Revenge, so you're onto a winner here as well.
As you beat the various bosses, you can unlock different transformations for Kei. Each defeated boss gives you a new way to smash through levels, whether it's digging tunnels, flying or even locking on to multiple enemies at once. You also build up currency that lets you use new abilities for each transformation, so there's a sense of progression throughout too.
If I had to find a drawback, it's that the game isn't massively challenging, although you can select the Retro difficulty level at the start, which gives you the traditional limited lives, so when it's game over it really is game over, whereas the modern setting is unlimited lives and you just get kicked back to the last checkpoint. This is nowhere near a dealbreaker though, as the game is just so much fun.
SUMMARY
If you're a retro platformer buff this is pretty much a must-buy, and it's accessible enough for all ages to have a blast. More of this please.
