A gorgeous facelift of a game that needed a whole lot more. This is the kind of remake where the modern visuals work against the whole - the bad combat feels even worse because the game looks like it should know better.

There's also a funny relic of a bygone era in the checkpoint system: no heals. You don't get full health after dying, or even between stages; you keep whatever health you had when you reached the last checkpoint. Fair play, it's old school to a fault, I can respect that. However -

If you find yourself stuck with low health at the beginning of a stage, it's trivial to backtrack to a previous level to replenish health, but it also sucks shit. This is the kind of change remakes should enact to "bring it up to modern sensibilities" without "losing its essence" - nothing's lost by cutting pure tedium.

Inessential.