Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril

Genre: Metroidvania

Players: 1

.

Review:

Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril is a Metroidvania released on Xbox One in 2022 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. Set in a futuristic society, your character has been sent after his former friend who stole an energy source that can be used to create a weapon, tracked down to an island fortress that you’ll need to explore, taking on various monsters and other hazards.

While it is a Metroidvania, Battle Kid was clearly inspired at least in part by the early Mega Man games, with a 2D pixel art visual style that’s somewhat similar to those games, as well as a chiptune soundtrack to match. While nothing extraordinary, this does do a good job of playing to nostalgia to evoke an earlier era of videogames.

In some ways, the Mega Man comparisons are apt, with players jumping and shooting (only three shots on-screen at a time, no less) in a way vaguely similar to Capcom’s classic character. In other ways, the homage seems less apt – your character can only take three hits before dying and being shunted to the last checkpoint, enemies are far more simple, and the platforming feels far less nuanced. None of these elements is necessarily bad, but it does make the moment-to-moment gameplay more shallow, and your limited health does make for a steeper difficulty with a lot more deaths.

You would hope that the Metroidvania elements would make up for this, but unfortunately these Metroidvania elements are also pretty shallow, with far less exploration and discovery than you would tend to look for in the genre.

In the end, Battle Kid still makes for a decent retro-style game that does a good job of reminding the player of… well, better games. But players hoping for something on par with Mega Man, or a solid Metroidvania, will be disappointed.

tl;dr – Battle Kid is a Metroidvania designed to be vaguely reminiscent of early games in the Mega Man series. Unfortunately, the gameplay isn’t as nuanced and well-designed as those games, and the Metroidvania elements are lacking. This is still a decent game (if you don’t mind repeatedly dying and restarting from checkpoints), but it doesn’t quite live up to what it’s aspiring to do.

Grade: C+

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