Review: Rockman 2 Gray Zone

Finished in 4h30. Streamed on youtube:

 

Rockman2 Gray Zone is a Rockman 2 romhack. It is one with many changes, such as new graphics, musics, weapons, boss and of course level design.

Talking about these news things (except level design that I'll talk about later), it is high quality. The musics are good and the graphics mostly so. Bar one part I died because the block had the same palette as the background (and I didn't know it was slippery), overall the graphics are nicely implemented.

The weapons have new effects, maybe more balanced than the original game but still some are way more useful than other. Airman's and Metalman's are probably the best while I never used Woodman's  one. The boss are modified too, to complement their new weapons, like how Airman throw fire. The weapons weakness changed too. The bosses are obviously harder than the original, but not impossibly hard like some romhacks.

About the difficulty, like most romhacks it is harder than the original but stay acceptable, except one stage I'll mention later.

Level design is good, the main stage are not too long or hard, E-tanks aren't scarce. There's some interesting setups, and enemies are varied (some hacks tends to spam Sniper Joe, this is not the case). While the normal stage are normal challenge, the Wily fortress stages are very platforming oriented, making full use of the 3 items you've got. It was interesting and the maker made sure that items refill respawn on death.

One unfortunate case is it use Rockman 2 as a base game. I personally think Mega Man 2 is overrated, and has some pretty bad things like some Wily boss or Quickman's lasers. And usually in romhacks it's way worse. Here there's the unfortunate problem of using Quickman's lasers near impossible to dodge, unless you have Flash Man's weapon.

And the big problem of this hack is Wily's castle 4. The Wily levels have some gimmicks, and this one use one of the worst gimmick in platformers: reduced visibility. There's some tiles with priority on where you can't see Mega Man except for a few pixels on his feet when he jump. Platforming section where you can't see yourself, how fun. But the boss... well the original Wily 4 boss was ass, here it's Mega Ass. You see a room with some pits, and one single wall cannon. After struggling finding it's weakness (it's full charged Heat) then... nothing? Actually, you have find the four next cannons, and there are all hidden under tiles, making them invisible. So you shoot all around the room waiting to hear the sound effect that you hit something. Of course they are placed in hard places. It's a puzzle boss like the original but 100% worse. Oh, and there's cannons off-screen that shoot at regular interval at you so fast it's inhuman to dodge all shoots, the only way I could beat the boss is abusing the pause trick; pausing the game repeatedly to use invulnerability frames and have the bullets pass through me. Without this I couldn't stand a chance.

So overall, the game is super nice, with lot of interesting new things and engaging level design, except for a few little mistakes, and a big one named Wily castle 4.

Rating:
⭐⭐⭐
Good