JALECOlle Famicom Ver. Bio-Warrior Dan The Increaser War

Genre: Action-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Bio-Warrior Dan is an Action-Platformer released on Famicom in 1987 and never ported to the West until this release on Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game has players fighting strange enemies as a time-traveling warrior seeking to save humanity from extinction.

I don’t know that there are any games I’ve played that I can compare Bio-Warrior Dan to, and this may be for the best because it is absolutely terrible. Horrible hit detection, atrocious platforming, clunky controls, nasty input lag, and unclear level design all make for a pretty miserable experience. It’s a shame too, because there are definitely some clever ideas here, like enemies that become more powerful over time encouraging players to complete levels quickly.

As you’d expect from a game from the Nintendo Entertainment System era, this game makes use of 2D pixel art visuals and a chiptune soundtrack, and though this game’s imagery is interesting, I wouldn’t call it good, exactly. That said, the soundtrack isn’t bad, with some catchy tunes throughout the game.

Despite that Bio-Warrior Dan wasn’t even a significant enough release to even get localized when it first came out, the Nintendo Switch version of the game has gotten a lot of love. This release comes with a gallery of box art, instruction manual art, promo art, behind-the-scenes making-of documents, achievements to pursue, a quick save feature, a rewind feature, display and control options, and a frame that includes helpful gameplay info and a synthesizer display showing the music being played in real-time. This is far more than I would have expected for such a niche game.

Still, I absolutely would not recommend Bio-Warrior Dan even to those curious about a game that was never before released in the West. The gameplay is so poorly-made that I think most players will lose patience with it within minutes.

tl;dr – Bio-Warrior Dan is an Action-Platformer that was never released in the West, and it’s easy to see why. Poorly made with bad platforming, terrible hit detection, horrible controls, and nasty input lag, I can’t see any modern players actually enjoying this.

Grade: D

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