Mighty Gunvolt Burst - REVIEW (Nintendo Switch)

In the absence of even a single new Mega Man game over the last seven years, two successors
have appeared to carry on the torch and fill the Blue Bomber-shaped hole in fans’ hearts:
Azure Striker Gunvolt and Mighty No. 9.
But while both may have aimed to take up Mega Man’s mantle, only one has gone on to be
successful in that endeavor: Gunvolt, whose two well-received 3DS games are also making
the jump to the Nintendo Switch next month.
Blue Bomber, Azure Striker… you can’t get much more on-the-nose than that.
Things could not have gone more differently for Beck, the star of Mighty No. 9.
The brainchild of Mega Man co-creator Keiji Inafune, Beck should have been a shoo-in for
the role of Mega Man’s successor, but after a disastrously run Kickstarter campaign, an
extended stay in development hell, and the most tone-deaf marketing in recent gaming
history, Mighty No. 9 limped across the finish line and was met with almost universally poor
reception.
These two wildly different inheritors to Mega Man’s legacy are now crossing over in Mighty
Gunvolt Burst, a retro-styled platformer that aims to give Beck and his fellow Mighty Numbers
a second chance at relevance.
And while Mighty No. 9 will probably always be dogged by its own infamy to some degree,
Mighty Gunvolt Burst is here to prove that Beck and co.
deserve an extra life.
But do they?
Let’s back up a bit.
This isn’t the first time Gunvolt and Beck have appeared in a game together.
Mighty Gunvolt Burst is actually a full-sized follow-up to Mighty Gunvolt, a bite-sized
spin-off that initially served as a free bonus for those who purchased the original Azure
Striker Gunvolt on the 3DS eShop.
A glorified distraction more than a full game in its own right, the original Mighty Gunvolt
served as little more than a brief teaser of the fully-fledged crossover title we now
know as Mighty Gunvolt Burst.
While Mighty Gunvolt repurposed elements from Azure Striker Gunvolt, Mighty Gunvolt Burst
mainly takes its inspiration from Mighty No. 9 — but this isn’t the death knell you
might think it is.
Given full creative control here, developer Inti Creates has managed to completely redefine
Beck and his Mighty siblings in the context of a much better game… and as it turns out,
that kind of makes a difference.
In Mighty No. 9’s case, it wasn’t the characters that failed the game — it was
the game that failed the characters.
To put it bluntly, this is the game Mighty No. 9 should’ve been all along, at least
in a general sense.
Each and every stage is a blast to play through, whether it’s your first run or your fifth.
Level gimmicks are used sparingly, and when they do appear they enhance the gameplay rather
than hinder it.
Gunvolt and Beck both benefit from snappy, responsive controls and consistent, reliable
physics.
And the boss battles are challenging, engaging affairs that reward you for recognizing patterns
and thinking on your feet in equal measure.
The Mighty Numbers don’t have those unbelievably obnoxious instant death attacks anymore, either!
It’s sometimes hard to believe these are the same bosses from Mighty No. 9, because
they’re all just so damn fun to fight here in Mighty Gunvolt Burst.
If you’ve played the games Beck and Gunvolt come from, you’ll quickly come to see that
both characters play a fair bit differently in Mighty Gunvolt Burst.
Beck can’t dash through enemies to defeat them in this game, and Gunvolt can’t tag
enemies with bullets to make them vulnerable to his Flashfield.
In fact, Gunvolt doesn’t even have his Flashfield here!
While Gunvolt does have limited access to some of his septimal abilities, like Astrasphere
and Luxcalibur, and Beck can eventually gain a mid-air dash that’s used purely for mobility,
both characters have more or less been stripped down to the pure essentials: running, jumping,
and shooting.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
There’s a certain purity in this kind of simplicity, and while this stripping down
of the characters’ unique abilities can make Beck and Gunvolt feel too similar to
one another early on, it isn’t long before the game gobsmacks you with the Customization
system… and it’s at this point that Mighty Gunvolt Burst’s surprising depth reveals
itself.
If you love running, jumping, and shooting but have always wished a platformer would
allow you to customize the “shooting” part to your heart’s content, well, welcome
to Mighty Gunvolt Burst.
Both Beck and Gunvolt’s basic shot can be customized in a downright shocking number
of ways, and your options only increase in number as you advance through the game and
find more custom ability pickups.
Now, I’m not just talking about customizing big-picture elements like the size, speed,
trajectory, behavior, and attack power of your shots.
Those options and many more are all present and accounted for, but Mighty Gunvolt Burst
allows you to get even more granular than that.
So, for example, maybe you’ve built a shot that will pierce through enemies but reflect
off walls before dissipating in a small explosion that deals extra damage.
That’s great, but there’s so much more to consider.
Do those shots come out one at a time, or in a cluster?
Do they reflect off walls at a 45-degree angle upward or downward?
Can they be reflected once, twice, or three times?
Does each shot end in one extra explosion or two?
Maybe three?
And how big are those explosions?
Obviously such a system requires checks and balances, and those come in the form of Cost
Points, or CP for short.
Quite simply, each customization has a CP cost attached to it, and the cost of all your
chosen customizations combined must be equal to or less than your maximum CP.
Your maximum CP is pretty meager to start but will increase as you play through the
game and collect CP pick-ups, steadily expanding your options by allowing you to equip more
customizations at once while mixing and matching the costlier ones more freely.
Honestly, it’s pretty incredible just how granular this system allows you to get and
how it empowers players to chart their own course through the game.
You’ll find that Mighty Gunvolt Burst can get pretty challenging if you try to brute-force
your way through with Beck and Gunvolt’s standard shots, but at the same time, every
single tricky enemy placement or tough boss can be utterly trivialized with the right
customizations.
In this way, Mighty Gunvolt Burst actively encourages you to bend its rules and even
break the game’s difficulty balance entirely if you so wish.
It’s also worth noting that even though Beck and Gunvolt feel very samey at the outset,
it isn’t long before you start unlocking customizations that are unique to either character.
These include Gunvolt’s septimal abilities, Beck’s wide variety of themed shots, and
- most importantly - their different midair movement abilities.
While Gunvolt can gain the ability to double, triple, and even quadruple-jump, Beck can
eventually air-dash up to three times per jump, ultimately making this mightiest of
numbers the star of the show.
Mighty Gunvolt Burst opens up in a whole new way once you start air-dashing around like
a pro and makes Beck’s campaign feel a little closer to playing a Mega Man X game, which
is never a bad thing.
Even so, as wonderful as the Customization system is, it’s not perfect.
The actual process of setting up your customizations is clunky and unintuitive, with the most granular
options being hidden behind multiple sub-menus that have to be scrolled through one at a
time.
It can get so obnoxious that, at times, I felt compelled to ignore the Customization
system entirely just so I wouldn’t have to deal with the headache.
The game also never bothers to explain how boss weaknesses work or how to properly capitalize
on them by setting up your shots with elemental properties, and it’s so unnecessarily obtuse
that I ended up ignoring boss weaknesses altogether.
Fortunately, the Customization system is so flexible that I never felt the need to rely
on boss weaknesses to begin with, so this issue isn’t as glaring as it could’ve
been.
Finally, while I wouldn’t necessarily call this a point against the game, it’s unfortunate
that the Burst mechanic for which Mighty Gunvolt Burst is named never really goes anywhere.
Bursting is easy enough to do; simply get up in an enemy’s grill before you destroy
them and you’ll get a Burst, complete with a cooler-looking explosion and a bonus to
your score.
You can build a Burst combo by destroying multiple enemies in a row up-close, but…
that’s really about it.
The game never gives you a good reason to shoot for high Burst combos or even Burst
at all, honestly.
All Bursting really does is add to your score, and considering you’re putting yourself
in harm’s way every time you attempt a Burst, all this mechanic essentially does is encourage
you to make the game harder for yourself while providing no meaningful incentive to do so.
And even if you’re the kind of player who loves chasing high scores, Mighty Gunvolt
Burst doesn’t include any online leaderboards, rendering the whole Burst mechanic almost
entirely meaningless in the end.
You can literally play through the whole game as both Beck and Gunvolt without Bursting
even a single enemy and you’ll have pretty much the same overall experience as someone
who Bursts as many enemies as possible.
So while the Burst system doesn’t take away from the game, neither does it add to it,
which feels like a wasted opportunity considering it’s part of the game’s very name.
But this is a minor hiccup in the grand scheme of things.
As I’ve firmly established, Mighty Gunvolt Burst is a blast to play and, aside from the
Burst mechanic, benefits from consistent, strong game design across the board.
It also looks pretty sharp, with Mighty No. 9’s world, characters, and stage concepts
being reimagined in a pixelated 12-bit style not unlike Inti Creates’ previous Nintendo
Switch release, Blaster Master Zero.
Of course, 2D platformers with retro-styled graphics aren’t exactly rare these days
— especially on the Nintendo Switch — and Mighty Gunvolt Burst certainly doesn’t push
the envelope in that regard.
But in this reviewer’s opinion, pixels never go out of style and, given Mighty No. 9’s
direct Mega Man roots, there’s a strong argument to be made here that this is closer
to how Mighty No. 9 should have looked all along.
And it’s true: the Mighty Numbers and their various stage concepts prove to be far more
memorable here than they ever were in their game of origin, with Beck himself looking
particularly slick.
The same can also be said of Mighty Gunvolt Burst’s music, which is essentially a strong
chiptune rendition of Mighty No. 9’s soundtrack with a few tunes from Gunvolt’s games and
some original tracks to round things out.
There’s not a whole lot else to say about it, really; if you love NES-style chip music
like I do, there are plenty of songs worth cranking the volume up for as you play Mighty
Gunvolt Burst.
For all of Mighty No. 9’s problems, its music generally wasn’t one of them, so it’s
nice to see these tunes getting more exposure in a better game.
Mighty Gunvolt Burst supports every play mode and control option available on the Nintendo
Switch except for playing with one JoyCon held sideways.
Given that we’re talking about a 2D platformer here, the D-pad-equipped Pro Controller is
unsurprisingly the ideal controller to use if you have one, but playing with both JoyCon
also delivers a surprisingly smooth control experience and I only occasionally felt hampered
when playing in handheld mode.
Meanwhile, the use of HD Rumble is subtle but effective, alerting you to the presence
of hidden areas and items once you’ve found a certain custom ability.
At the start of this review, I posed a key question: do Beck and his fellow Mighty Numbers
deserve a second chance?
Mighty Gunvolt Burst answers that question with an emphatic, confident “yes.”
I like it a lot, and I’m still playing it to get as close to 100% completion as I can
— it’s that good.
There are some minor blunders along the way, but the astounding depth offered by the Customization
system generally makes up for them and Mighty Gunvolt Burst is simply a strong, consistent,
and highly replayable platformer across the board.
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Mighty Gunvolt Burst - REVIEW (Nintendo Switch)

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