Duck Tales: Remastered

Tom

If you know anything about me, you know I'm a fan of retro gaming. I mean look at our latest music video, it has Mario and Mortal Kombat in it. So you can picture me looking just like the dude on the left here when I heard Capcom was re-releasing the NES game Duck Tales.

But it wasn't just a re-release, it was a total remake - graphics-wise at least. An HD remastered version. I'm not exactly sure how to feel about that. I love how the new Rayman games look like for example but I still love pixel art on retro games. I kinda hoped they would've redone the graphics with more respect to the game's 8-bit roots. But still the game looks great even if it's not all pixel art.

I didn't get to play the original that much. I know I played it once or twice but never beat it on NES. So playing Duck Tales: Remastered was pretty much a new experience for me.

The first thing I noticed after getting into Duck Tales: Remastered was just how steep the learning curve of the game is. They do show you the core mechanics of the game in the opening level and you can beat it pretty easily. But after that... It gets hard as hell pretty soon. It's not hard because the game is unfair or because it's broken. It's hard because you just suck at it. At first that is.

The game was originally made by the people behind the original Megaman games and that definitely shows in the level design. The game let's you choose between five different locations but don't be fooled into choosing the first one on the list first. I ended up playing the stages in pretty much reversed order after getting sick of trying to get through the first two levels.

Once you master the controls and the mechanics of the game, it's pretty straight forward. I like how the controls are really tight unlike on some more recent platformers. The game can be pretty punishing like a retro game ought to be. You start with three hearts as health and when they're gone, you're gonna have to start the level all over again. No checkpoints. I was glad to find out they do give you an extra heart on every stage. Well, almost every stage. I couldn't find one in the Amazon stage - the one first on the list. And that just proves my point about not playing the stages in the given order.

The gameplay is one thing to like about this game but the other is definitely the soundtrack. The music on every stage is simply amazing. The perfect mixture of retro 8-bit tunes and modern sounds. Music must be the one thing motivating for a replay since you can unlock the songs as extra content once you'll get enough money in your bank.

I played through Duck Tales in just two sessions. That's pretty quick for a $15 game. It is a remake so they couldn't just add more levels, I get that. But they could make it like $10 cheaper.

Still, if you're a fan of retro platformers - or just platformers in general - Duck Tales: Remastered is probably worth your money. And hey, maybe we can show Capcom it would be profitable to bring us a remastered Megaman game or two!