(review updated on 13 Feb 2021) I really enjoyed this when I was young, and it's held up remarkably well now that I've finally gotten around to replaying it. The soundtrack is great, and the level design is very adept, rewarding keen-eyed exploring with hidden power-ups and generally being very memorable visually (the highlight is the wreckage of an ancient battlecraft that you explore at a 45-degree angle). Each level is topped off with a boss fight that for me was tense and challenging but still fair. Perhaps the most memorable gameplay element are the four different AI monsters you can choose to assist you: a dragon (strong but a sitting duck due to his size), fireball (damages enemies by touching them, is nearly impossible to kill), boomerang lizard (agile and has good fire rate) and my favorite thunder lizard (abysmal firing rate but has the best damage and hits the entire screen). Being able to switch between these four monsters at will adds an extra dimension to the gameplay and picking the right one for the right situation can spell the difference between winning and losing.
I did have some gripes with the difficulty:
- Many fast moving enemies that spawn without warning. The slightly zoomed-in perspective doesn't help, giving you little time to react. While the game mostly gives enough power-ups for you to make some mistakes, I found that it adversely affected the pacing of the game since I was forced to inch forward to avoid being overwhelmed.
- The thunder effects are great but they sometimes 'cover up' enemy projectiles, making them very difficult to see.
- There's a strange quirk with the controls where sometimes you land from a jump and immediately can move, but sometimes when you land you have a couple frames of crouching, before you stood back up to move again. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what caused the delay or how to prevent it, which was quite an annoyance against the final boss which required quick jumps in succession to avoid one of his attacks.
Those gripes aside, I do have a threshold for a certain level of cheapness in older games and the minor frustrations didn't spoil my experience, especially since the controls were generally tight and responsive. For me this is one of the great hidden gems of Genesis action games.
I did have some gripes with the difficulty:
- Many fast moving enemies that spawn without warning. The slightly zoomed-in perspective doesn't help, giving you little time to react. While the game mostly gives enough power-ups for you to make some mistakes, I found that it adversely affected the pacing of the game since I was forced to inch forward to avoid being overwhelmed.
- The thunder effects are great but they sometimes 'cover up' enemy projectiles, making them very difficult to see.
- There's a strange quirk with the controls where sometimes you land from a jump and immediately can move, but sometimes when you land you have a couple frames of crouching, before you stood back up to move again. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what caused the delay or how to prevent it, which was quite an annoyance against the final boss which required quick jumps in succession to avoid one of his attacks.
Those gripes aside, I do have a threshold for a certain level of cheapness in older games and the minor frustrations didn't spoil my experience, especially since the controls were generally tight and responsive. For me this is one of the great hidden gems of Genesis action games.