Review by: Michael Barnes

Moon Diver arrives on a crest of goodwill and high expectations—the project director is Koichi Yotsui, the man who also headed up development on the classic Sega Genesis title Strider. It’s fairly clear that there was some attempt to recapture past glories with the game’s acrobatic, sword-slashing action although more modern enhancements such as fully 3D graphics, a mild leveling mechanic, and four player online co-op steer it clear of pointless 16-bit revivalism. Unfortunately, the game misses the mark rather egregiously, failing to meet the standards of excellence that other recent retro-styled action platformer games have set.

The first few levels of Moon Diver are decent enough, and fans of Strider or other classic platformers ranging from the original Ninja Gaiden games to classic Castlevania titles will feel right at home. Control is smooth, fluid, and the titular Moon Diver characters (some kind of magical ninjas, according to the minimal storyline) have a couple of cool acrobatic moves and an array of “Moonsault Combo” magic attacks and buffs in addition to the basic sword slash. There are four characters to choose from with another available as paid DLC, and each specialize in one of the three stats with an all-arounder promising to upgrade everything equally over the course of the game’s 12 levels. Cutting down the various bad guys earns XP, which allows you to increase health, magic, and power reserves slightly.

So far so good. A good-looking old-school action game with development incentives and four-player co-op is always welcome in the downloadable marketplace. It doesn’t take long, however, before the utter repetitiveness and the stultifying lack of inspiration begins to wear. Enemy types are limited and extremely boring, and the game can be incredibly frustrating due to sharp difficulty spikes and nigh-unavoidable damage and deaths. Even the bosses are ho-hum, and the levels lack any sense of ingenuity or atmosphere beyond standard Japanese sci-fi tropes. Worse, the levels have no checkpoints and the arena sections wherein players have to defeat a set number of enemies in a confined area just feel grueling rather than challenging.

Played with one other player either locally or online, the game can at least foster some interest, if only because the feeling of camaraderie that develops from enduring a bad game together with another sufferer. The more difficult bosses practically require at least another player if only to double the damage output and reduce the amount of time they’re beating you down, but the game lacks any kind of synergetic or codependency mechanics that encourage players to collude beyond a revival action when one goes down and some combinable magic attacks— it’s more or less just a hack and slash affair with intermittent jumping. What’s worse, with three or four players the game becomes a blurry, unfocused mess. Characters get lost in the shuffle and the repetitive, game-stopping animations for those “Moonsault Combos” become extremely irritating.

If you’re willing to stick with it, there is a lot of content and I do like that any of the 12 levels can be selected for online play, at least that way you can avoid some of the more boring ones. There are also some DLC challenge modes available if for whatever reason you can’t get your fill of this poor game. For my part, I dread having to ever play it again.

Moon Diver simply can’t compete with recent entries like Outland, Vampire Smile, or Hard Corps: Uprising. Although fundamentally similar, those games offer much more variety and dynamic gameplay that combine retro and modern sensibilities to far greater effect. I would have loved to have seen Mr. Yotsui come forward with a game at least as good as Strider, which was one of the best action games of the 16-bit era, but this title feels more like one of the also-rans from that period that no one remembers or plays any longer. I suspect that it won’t be very long before those descriptors can be applied to this miserable game.