Kamen Rider (SNES)

 

 It's a common criticism of SNES beat em ups that compared to their Mega Drive and arcade contemporaries, they can be a little slow, and they rarely have more than a couple of enemies onscreen at a time. There are exceptions, though, and oddly enough, one such exception is this licensed game based on a TV show that was more than twenty years old when it came out.

 

Anyway, player one plays as Takeshi Hongo/Kamen Rider 1, and player two is Hayato Ichimonji/Kamen Rider 2, and they go through various typical 1970s tokusatsu locations (quarries, docks, theme parks, etc.) beating up uniformed goons from the fascist terror group Shocker, as well as various monstrous members of that organisation. Some of the monster enemies are recurring villains, appearing in multiple stages, but the boss of each stage is unique each time. A lot of the bosses even have unique death cutscenes, which see them being kicked off of rooves, out of windows, and so on. Some of them just have a fairly generic death where they're shown exploding in front of a different background each time.

 

The transformation gimmick works in a different way to the likes of Cyber Cross - Busou Keiji. In that game, you always want to be transformed, but it's limited by power up appearances and your character's health. In Kamen Rider, you can transform at any time at the press of a button, but there's a small strategic advantage to waiting until you really need to. Transforming makes you stronger, faster, and more resilient, and it also completely refills your health. So it makes the most sense to keep fighting off enemies for as long as you can in your untransformed form, waiting until you've almost lost a life before doing it. But obviously, this creates a little game of chicken you the player: do you transform now, or take a couple more hits, and risk losing a life and wasting a whole transformed health bar?

 

There's a few things in this game I couldn't really engage with. One was the selection of little training mini-stages between the actual stages. Because of the language barrier, I wasn't sure what to do in them, or what the point of them was. The other was the SSI system, which seems to be a way of building your own attack strings. This one, I just didn't have the patience for, and I seemed to be getting through the game just fine without it.

 

It's not a perfect game, but Kamen Rider is definitely worth your time. It's fun to play, looks great, and is a treat for fans of either beat em ups or tokusatsu. It's not the best SNES beat em up, but it's definitely pretty high up in the ranks!