Battle oppression in a bleak dystopian future as a robotic samurai in Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider.  The game is designed to look and play like a 16-bit 2-D action game, like what you might’ve seen on the SEGA Genesis or Super Nintendo.  It’s available on PlayStation consoles, Switch, and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.

As the cyborg samurai, you can run and jump, as well as swing a laser sword to defeat enemies, wall jump, dash, and use a special attack.  Special attacks drain a meter, but you can refill it and your energy meter with items in the levels.  You start out at an intro stage, but after that you can select your stage like Mega Man.  When you defeat a boss, you’ll get another special attack, like a super dash move.  You can also equip chips you find that gives you perks.  Like one that lets you take more damage, but you won’t get a stage rank higher than a B when you use it.  The stages have a lot of variety.  There’s even one stage where you view the action behind you riding a motorcycle and it’s like a cross between a racing game and shooting stage as you zip through a futuristic city.

I love the 16-bit style of the game and how it looks like something I would’ve rented back in the SNES days.  But the game is just too darn hard.  And a lot of the difficulty comes from how slow your character moves, and the fact that enemies move three times as fast as you and can attack from any part of the screen with projectiles while you only have a little sword.  Too bad there wasn’t any Easy mode.  If there was, I think I would’ve liked this one a lot more.

Kid Factor:

Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Blood and Gore, Language, and Violence.  I didn’t notice any bad language, but you can slash enemies that explode into parts and red pixel blood when defeated.  Because of that and the high difficulty level, I’d say this one’s best for teens and older gamers only.

Tags: Game Reviews