Shockman (Virtual Console) Review

There are programs out there that let you make your own computer games without knowing any programming languages. These games end up being pretty bad and only enjoyable to the person who made it (and maybe his/her immediate friends). Shockman feels like one of those games. It looks and plays cheap. It doesn’t help that the game glitches quite a bit. Strange, colored boxes will flash on the screen, and the music often sounds like the system just froze during a transition between levels.

Shockman is similar to Mega Man since you play as a blue guy with an arm cannon, but arm cannons don’t always equal immediate coolness. Your character has no other means of attack, except for a charged shot that does slightly more damage than normal. Jumping is also very floaty and will no doubt lead to many lava plummets. And lava pits are about as exciting as these levels get. This is basic running and shooting with very little creativity evident anywhere. In fact, many levels feel like the same platforms over and over with a couple boss battles thrown in to give you time to forget that the next section is just a repeat. At least there is a fair amount of variation in the boss battles, though some of these kill the fram erate as soon as they step on screen.

There is also a little variety in the fact that some levels turn into side-scrolling shooters, but, like the action sequences, these aren’t done particularly well, either. These make for some of the harder moments in the game, too. Shockman is no easy ride. Life is easy to lose and hard to come by. There are cheat codes that will restore your life or turn you invincible, but these are surprisingly difficult to enter correctly, themselves. Shockman is only eight levels long, however, and losing a life simply restarts you at the beginning of the current stage.

If there is any good that I can say about Shockman, it’s that the game features a co-op mode. After all, two players are always better than one, right? Well… in Shockman’s case, the co-op mode is possibly worse. Players share a life bar instead of having their own, which means it is much easier to die. Hitting the other player with a charged shot also does some wacky things. If your partner is likewise charged when you hit them, they will actually release a mega blast that does a lot of damage. It’s an interesting and useful tactic but is offset by what happens when the player is not charged. They turn into an orange ball and bounce around the screen at random. You would think this would at least hurt enemies you come in contact with, but it doesn’t. Turning into a ball serves no other purpose than to annoy you.

Final Comments

It is said that Shockman was the TurboGrafx’s answer to Mega Man, but five minutes of this clunker is all it takes to see that Mega Man didn’t really have anything to worry about. Shockman is, plain and simple, a bad game. It’s hard to find any saving grace here. Not even the co-op mode can make Shockman a tolerable experience. Do not download.