Here’s another Mega Man-inspired indie game. Metagal is low-budget but enjoyable with a mostly-female cast, and some nice pixel art. I especially liked playing as the extra unlockable characters.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. A guy has created some robots, but a bad guy takes them to use as weapons. The last remaining robot unlocks hidden power to fight the bad guy and free the other robots. So it’s Mega Man, except the four (plus one) robot bosses plus the main character are ladybots. Metagal herself can jump ‘n’ shoot, plus dash and has a recharging energy bar for the special weapons she wins from bosses, as well as a default larger blast.
There’s health pickups, but the energy bar can also be used to heal yourself at any time… at the cost of one golden gear. These gears—a renewable resource dropped from enemies or found in levels—are a nice innovation for the formula, allowing you a heal in this way. Their other use is to respawn you at the last screen transition after a death. Checkpoints also exist, which makes this feature redundant depending where you die but can save you some bother. So there’s some slight clumsiness with the gears’ implementation but they’re a nice feature to make the game friendlier.
I must mention I like how this game looks, from some of the backgrounds—as seen in the screenshot above—to the sprite art. The exception to this is the somewhat amateurish portrait art, and the character designs themselves. The robot characters are overly sexualised in their outfit designs; this is challenged by the main character in dialogue but hanging a lampshade on it does not excuse it or make it not a problem.
But speaking of the other robot characters, an excellent feature of Metagal is that after clearing the story, you unlock the four boss robots to play as, and each one of them has an interesting moveset that includes fun movement abilities! My favourite was the fire-based boss who has increased running speed and a double jump. All of them (including Metagal herself) can also be improved by finding a hidden powerup in each of the four initial stages.
The main knock against this game is that you can feel the low budget and the small, inexperienced dev team at times. There’s the occasional slight jank in enemy behaviour, menus have oddly delayed responses, and the script is awkward (there’s even a typo in the dev studio’s name in the credits). But for a budget price it’s easy to look past that to a fun little game with solid level design and a compelling reason to play it through five times!
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