"NES Era Boxart, Will You Ever Learn?"

In Power Blade, Taito took elements from several popular franchises of the era and smooshed them all together to get a game that is, surprisingly, pretty good.

You play as Nova, the Chief Security Officer of Master Computer. Aliens have caused the Master Control Program to malfunction in an attempt to wipe out New Earth. It is up to you to track down the missing data tapes to restore the MCP to it’s full functionality, and save the world in the process.

There are six stages that you can choose from, all of which need to be completed to get into the final stage in the middle of the map screen. You can play stages one through six in any order you choose, though there is no benefit to playing them out of sequence.

As the title of the game implies, your weapons are boomarangs. When you first start, you can only throw one at a time, and it only travels about a foot in front of your face. Some enemies will drop power-ups that will increase how far the boomerang is thrown, how many you can throw at a time, and how powerful each boomerang is. When you lose lives, you lose some of the power-ups you’ve collected. When you need to continue, you lose them all. You do keep your level progress, though.

There is also a helmet icon hidden in each level which gives you a robot suit that makes you look like RoboCop, but run like Arthur from “Ghosts and Goblins”, and also gives you the titular “Power Blade.” These can be shot 8 different directions and go through almost anything. You only have three hits before you are back to your normal, Schwarzenegger looking self.

Hidden in each level is an agent, which have the security cards necessary to reach the boss rooms. The levels are set up as mazes, though none of the levels feel very large. The bosses are also highly unbalanced. The bosses for the first and second stages are, by far, the hardest parts of the game. If you can beat them, the rest of this game is a cake-walk.

The best way I can describe this game is Mega Man meets Castlevania (with a few other references thrown in for good measure). Nova controls very similarly to Mega Man from the original game, with one big exception; There is no knock-back. This makes jumping most of the pits in the game a breeze since you don’t have to worry about getting hit in the process. Other things taken straight from other games include the robo-mermen, which behave like the regular mermen in Castlevania, as well as the glowing orbs and dry-bones-like characters lifted straight out of Mario 3

Overall, Power Blade is a fun game that can easily be played through in a hour or two. I recommend playing with a friend and trading off the controller, as this is how I roll when it comes to NES games.

Tags: castlevania, Mega Man, NES, Power Blade, RoboCop, Schwarzenegger, Taito

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.