Retro Revengers Review

Five friends, Ossan, Mao, Taicho, Matchan and Notchi, known as the Retro Revengers are pulled into a strange land that threatens everything including their world. The Retro Goddess has bestowed unique powers upon them to defend themselves and take down the Demon Overlord of Triple-A.

Retro Revengers is a typical 2D action platformer where players go from start to finish; where at the end of each level, they’ll be greeted by big nasty boss looking to squash you like a bug. Each character has their own special skill which can be used normally or charged up.

To go along each characters’ unique attack, they also are confronted with diverse challenge. For example, Mao can hover over the ground for a few seconds if you hold the jump button down for a few seconds; whereas Taicho can use his charged up attack as a grapple.

After killing certains enemies and bosses, you’ll be rewarded with coins… that have no real purposes except giving you the opportunity to continue in the level you died… which again is pointless because when loading the game, you can choose the level where you left at.

The game looks fine; nothing really wrong with its 2D 16-bit pixelated visuals. It’s a highly colorful and palette diverse game where each character has its own themed level. Enemy design is pretty simplistic and nothing really exceptional. The soundtrack is incredibly generic and forgettable. AS I’ve said before, it sounds like someone through a keyboard down a set of stairs and pulled a soundtrack out of the results.

Given this is another Ratalaika published project, I did expect problems here. The first one being Mao’s weapon. He throws knives in a arc, meaning if you’re not positioned in a certain way or enemies are constantly moving, you won’t hit anything and it’s incredibly annoying. It’s even worst than the rock weapon in Friday the 13th (on NES). Second of all, why give players a huge health bar, when you die after 3-4 hits?

The best way to sum this up: Retro Revengers was clearly not QA’ed for the fun factor. It’s a generic irritating platformer with questionable level design and iffy controls. While it’s a nice touch to have a variety of unique skills, it also means they don’t control all the same; some feel floaty, others feel like they have cement filled boots. There are many more better platformers available on Xbox Marketplace; so unless you’ve played them all or want to experience this out of curiosity, don’t bother.