Darkwing Duck is a platformer for the NES, based on the Disney cartoon from the early 90s. It's one of several Capcom developed NES games based on Disney properties, most of which were actually pretty good. It's built on the Mega Man engine, and has a similar jumping and shooting mechanic as the game on which it's based.
Similar to the Mega Man games, you'll have a choice as to the level you'd like to tackle. Rather than having every level open to you at the start, however, the game is more similar to Mega Man 7 in that you can only select from a handful of stages at the start, and upon beating this handful, you can then unlock more selectable stages. The level design is good, but not great. There are plenty of creative spots here, and fewer "BS" moments than Mega Man, but also fewer cool level design ideas compared to its progenitor.
Gameplay is fine, but not quite as tight as a Mega Man game. The new wrinkle in this game is that Darkwing Duck can hang from objects in the background, enabling you to move up in a level in a vertical manner that you typically don't see in a Mega Man game. However, the exact hitbox for when the hang will trigger, and when it won't, can be imprecise and will definitely kill you on occasion.
Rather than unlockable weapons taken from robot masters, special weapons in this game can be picked up throughout the stage. Each special gas has a different effect, although none of them, save for the arrow, feel useful. The arrow behaves similarly to various Mega Man special weapons in that you can use it to stick in a wall, and jump up to areas that would be otherwise unreachable. Darkwing can only hold one special weapon at a time, so be sure to plan carefully for what you'll need! Unlike Mega Man, bosses in this game do not have weaknesses to any specific weapon, so use whatever you'd like! The bosses were fine, by the way. A few were pretty creative and interesting, particularly the mechanic that has to fix the machines you break, but others seemed cheap and frustrating, particularly the end boss.
I loved the length of the game. A skilled player can clear it in about a half an hour, and slogging through the stages with no experience probably took about 2 and a half hours. I played it on the Disney Afternoon Collection, so I had plenty of chances to work on individual segments of the game.
The graphics for this game are pretty good. They're not quite the same level of detail as one of the fourth through sixth Mega Man games, but are more similar to a quality found in Mega Man 2 or Mega Man 3. Nothing to complain about.
The music is composed by Yasuaki Fujita, of Mega Man 3 and Breath of Fire fame, and is very good. I wouldn't put it in the class of any of the Mega Man games, but there are plenty of good tracks here.
On the whole, this is a good NES game. It's not DuckTales, and it's probably not even at the level of The Little Mermaid and Chip n' Dale's Rescue Rangers, but it's a good effort from an excellent developer. I'll give it an 8.0/10.
I've already teased some of the stuff I'm working on, but here's another teaser, because I'm a maniac and am trying to play four home console games at once at the moment!
-TRO
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