Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider it’s got everything you’d want from an indie homage to 16-bit action platformers: there’s detailed industrial pixel art, crisp death animations, and plenty of spike pits. It’s short but explosive and would be right at home in any 90s arcade cabinet tucked away in the back corner of a pizzeria or bowling alley.
Releases January 12 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch and PC, Vengeful Guardian is the latest retro tribute from JoyMasher, a Brazilian studio founded by Danilo Dias and Thais Weiller. The indie duo’s latest game, Flaming Chromewas an impressive love letter to running and shooting side scrollers like Contra and A metal slug. Vengeful Guardian is an equally painstaking yet festive nod to the past, this time borrowing heavily from games like Shinobi and Ninja Gaiden with a hint of Mega Man X thrown. It’s not so much an outright reimagining of these classics as a reverent replica that sits comfortably alongside them.
You play as one of the products of a despotic regime that uses robots to maintain an iron grip on a futuristic metropolis. For whatever reason, you are wired to have a conscience, and instead of protecting those in power, you decide to kill your fellow guardians one by one until the people rise up and overthrow the government. The world building, minimal as it is, combines the thrilling brutality of A robot cop with David Cronenberg’s unsettling horror and grime rendering of a body horror film. Meanwhile, the revolution is fueled by an energetic techno soundtrack from composer Dominik Ninmark, which adds urgency to the horror.
The result is close to a dozen side-scrolling sci-fi levels with slight backtracking where you dodge hazards, slice through opposing enemy forces, and take on a host of bosses large and small using a lightsaber, double-tap, and wall-jump. While there are a handful of branching paths and challenging platforming set pieces, Vengeful Guardian is more focused on showing off its dystopian designs and lavish pixel art than hitting you over the head with difficulty eating.
G/O Media may receive a commission
Credit up to $100
Samsung backup
Reserve the next generation Samsung device
All you have to do is sign up with your email and boom: credit towards your pre-order of a new Samsung device.
At one stage, a giant robot chases you through a forest in the background, knocking down trees and throwing punches from afar, until you later face it in a mini-boss battle. On another level, parasites unleashed in mining take over your cyborg enemies and cause their heads to explode as they transform into lumpy masses of antagonistic flesh. The cherry on top is how rewarding it feels to go through each one, with visual effects and unique death animations that make the otherwise simple levels vibrant and dynamic. The vehicle levels, including the ones that have you racing around town with 7-style 3D effects, also spice things up a bit and are gorgeous to boot.
And unlike many of the games Vengeful Guardian borrowed from, it is generous with checkpoints and health containers. It also offers you a diverse arsenal of special abilities and upgrades. Similar to Megaman, defeating each boss gives you one of their powers. My personal favorites were a hyper-dash attack and a dark portal that unleashes a Cthulhu-like tentacle, though overall neither felt like much of a game changer. More transformative are the upgrades, which range from things like health regeneration from each enemy killed to a scanner that alerts you to hidden locations of other power-ups. There are about a dozen in total, including double jump and extra armor that halves the damage you take.
The latter essentially lets you blast your way through most bosses, allowing you to push them aggressively without having to worry about learning their attack patterns or fine-tuning your twitch reflexes. The only consequence is that it limits the score you can get on each level to a B, incentivizing you to go back and eventually perfect each level to potentially unlock something extra, which I have yet to do in my two or so hours with the game.
This runtime left me wanting more from Vengeful Guardian rather than just brushing up on levels I’d already completed, but I’ll take that over games overstaying their welcome or running out of ideas, but still going another five hours. like Shinobi III or the other ’90s hack-and-slash platformers it channels, Vengeful Guardian it lets you get in, have fun, and put the controller back down before you’re tempted to throw it across the room. There are no new ideas here, but it presents the old ones with polish and shine.