OK hear me out.
Mechanically it's 100% a disaster - difficult in all the worst ways and reliant on a jumping mechanic that is fundamentally broken (expecting you to press a button to turn around every time you land, for christ's sake).
It doesn't have anything resembling a real story. It somehow has junkier, more generic level-design than a trad straight-line left-to-right arcade brawler.
HOWEVER. The game sincerely successfully translates the trashy kung-fu B-movie atmosphere of the early games, right down to the Wal-Mart spandex costumes of the cutscene actors. The world feels slow, lumbering, threatening, and the music is surprisingly great given how low-rent the rest of the presentation feels. It would have benefited from more strict adherence to pre-rendered 2d backgrounds, but what's here suits the overall mood. In other words, it's not really a "so bad it's good" situation so much as it's just accidentally a unique and interesting aesthetic. I mean I don't recommend ever playing it.
Mechanically it's 100% a disaster - difficult in all the worst ways and reliant on a jumping mechanic that is fundamentally broken (expecting you to press a button to turn around every time you land, for christ's sake).
It doesn't have anything resembling a real story. It somehow has junkier, more generic level-design than a trad straight-line left-to-right arcade brawler.
HOWEVER. The game sincerely successfully translates the trashy kung-fu B-movie atmosphere of the early games, right down to the Wal-Mart spandex costumes of the cutscene actors. The world feels slow, lumbering, threatening, and the music is surprisingly great given how low-rent the rest of the presentation feels. It would have benefited from more strict adherence to pre-rendered 2d backgrounds, but what's here suits the overall mood. In other words, it's not really a "so bad it's good" situation so much as it's just accidentally a unique and interesting aesthetic. I mean I don't recommend ever playing it.