Capcom has denied fans of Mega Man any substantial new games in the series. The Blue Bomber has been relegated to cameo duty or appearing in games like Super Smash Bros in order to get any kind of recognition. Well, LunarCore Games has decided to hearken back to the days of challenging side-scrolling platformers with the upcoming release of Legends of the Universe: Starcore.
The game is like an home to the old 8-bit Mega Man games on the NES. It features dashing, double jumping and water-walking with the help of upgrades, along with stat-based platforming, large environments to explore and boss battles at the end of the levels.
The developers describe it as a Metroidvania-style game due to some of the puzzle solving involved, but the combat and the platforming looks an awful lot like Mega Man to me. In fact, the main character that you play, Trion, looks like 8-bit filtered version of CutMan and Protoman fused together. You can see what the gameplay looks like with the trailer below.
The gameplay is obviously a lot faster than the old 8-bit Mega Man titles, but they still retain that shoot-first-ask-later design where you’re constantly on the move and always looking over your shoulder to ensure you don’t get blasted to death from out of nowhere.
Design wise, I think the game looks very playable. I’m not sure how responsive the controls are or whether or not everything is finely tuned to be tight and intuitive, but the trailer looks promising.
My only issue would probably be the palette color scheme, which reminds me of old computer platformers from back in the day where the graphics used a small pool of grays, oranges and greens.
If the gameplay is solid and the price is just right, things may turn out decently enough for Legends of the Universe.
Additionally, if you have a potato PC you shouldn’t have any problems playing the game. It only requires a PC with a 1.2ghz CPU, 120MB of RAM and a video gard with 128MB of VRAM. Very, very, very conservative specs.
You can learn more about the game by hitting up the Steam store page. Legends of the Universe: StarCore is set to release next week on July 26th.
