1. I have never played the original Mega Man X so I can't compare this PSP remake to the classic SNES game. Skip this review if that's what you want. Or read it anyway. I honestly have no way of doing what you do. Tell you what: how about you just not read this and just tell me you did?
2. I have played through many of the original NES Mega Man titles so I have that much context. I'm not a total loser.
3. This is very much in the vein of those old games. You play as a rightward running ro-bot. You shoot pellets. You kill descriptively named bosses and possess their powers through secret ro-bottical magicks. Doctor Lite is there. There's a bad guy. You're blue. I don't know, people. This is a Mega Man game, whatever that means to you.
4. Compared to the NES games, this is much less platforming heavy. It is mostly focused on shooting. This isn't a bad thing, just know what you're getting into.
5. Actually, really the only difficulty in platforming is done through cheap as stuff like having an enemy right on the edge of ledge just off screen. This is pretty balls if you ask me. If you want to get through levels w/o taking damage, your only recourse is to memorize enemy placements.
6. The levels really aren't the focus here anyway, it's all about the bosses. This formula works in this case because the boss battles are excellent. The bosses are varied in both appearance and form so they play out quite different. They have a way of feeling almost impossible when you first encounter them and then pretty easy by the time you beat them, which I feel is highly indicative of good boss design. Plus there is the standard Mega Man wrinkle of having each boss
be vulnerable to a weapon you collect by beating another boss which adds
an element of experimentation and strategy to the overall game.
7. There are two difficulty levels: normal and hard. Normal feels like pretty standard Mega Man difficulty, maybe slightly on the easy side for that. Hard is, unsurprisingly, much harder. I appreciate that the hard mode does not just throw enemies w/ more hit points at you. The bosses use different attack patterns which make some tactics that work in normal mode less effective. In other words, they are actually more difficult and don't just take longer because they can tank more hits.
8. One weapon kills basically everything but bosses in one shot and sort of acts as a de facto easy mode if you chose to pick it up early on. I know I did. After that, shooting through enemies was like taking a luxury cruise. Honestly, like most games in the franchise, you can pretty much cheese the difficulty of the whole game if you use a
FAQ and look up the bosses' weaknesses and locations of various secret
powerups. I did some of this too. Come at me.
9. You are also given the opportunity to play as another character, Vile, after completing the game once on any difficulty. This plays much differently and is much harder--like getting through the first level is more difficult than the final boss on normal difficulty. It practically feels like a whole new game. They even give you a few new cut scenes to watch for your effort.
10. Graphically, I reckon this game looks pretty nice. You character and enemy sprites are nice, clean polygonal models. You can almost always see very clearly what is going on and what can potentially hurt you. The amount of slowdown sometimes seems excessive but that is my only real complaint. I do kind of wish the sprites were a bit smaller to allow more things to happen on screen and potentially make for some more interesting platforming but this all works fine enough.
11. I love the soundtrack. It sounds like old rockin' chiptunes redone w/ electrical guitars and other real instruments. I suppose this is exactly what it is because it is a remake of the original Mega Man X soundtrack. I've never played that though so who knows.
12. Bafflingly, some folks play Mega Man games for the story so I suppose I'd ought to mention it before concluding this review. Mega Man Maverick Hunter X has a story. It is told through badly voice acted clip scenes. The gist of it is some ro-bots are bad and you gotta kill 'em.
13. Mega Man Maverick Hunter X resides in kind of an interesting space as far as the franchise's history. It is a remake of something that was already a 1990s equivalent of a gritty reboot. I am really not sure who would particularly want to play this now aside from dedicated 2000s-era handheld players like myself. Most nostalgia seekers would probably opt for the original Mega Man X, which you can play on a variety of relatively current platforms. Still, taken on its own merits Maverick Hunter X is a great game. Boss battles are tense and exciting and there's plenty of reasons to replay for additional challenge. It will probably end up being viewed as something of a footnote in the grand history of Mega Man but sometimes things like that are the most fun to check out down the road.
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