2/5 ★ – Kalle_Deimos's review of Mega Man X5.

TLDR: This is some of the most convoluted mechanics I've ever seen for a boring side-scroller that lasts about 5 hours. Gameplay: I don't know what they were cooking here but this is not it. Most of the stages are very boring. The Mavericks are super easy as well and their sub-weapons are pretty generic. I wasn't really switching them around too often if at all. Most of the time when I got the urge to experiment the basic enemy was immune so whatever. So if these aspects of the game are boring, then what does a Mega Man even have? New stuff, that's right. NEW never before seen mechanics and they're too complicated for their own good. You have 16 hours total to get to the Sigma Stages. Each time you enter a stage, an hour passes. What does this time limit do besides give you a game over? Well, bosses have "levels" now. These levels dont make them more difficult, instead once they're a certain level, defeating them nets you equipment parts. These parts are just small bonuses like extra damage reduction, faster movement speed, a special shot. Stuff that like. Okay, that's cool. HOWEVER, bosses only really become a high enough level to drop parts once you have less than 10 hours. If you're just going through the game casually then you won't really see these parts until you have about 2 Mavericks left. The game is already almost over and only now you're unlocking things. And there's a lot of parts too, there's like 16 of them. And I found 4. Very cool. What's the trade-off? Well now we have multiple armor sets! You actually start of the game with the Fourth Armor from MMX4 and it's upgraded accordingly. Making there be almost no reason to choose basic Mega Man. Like at all. Choosing him is actually a liability since he's so weak and choosing the Fourth Amor makes the game too easy. So it's a pick your poison situation. Throughout the stages you can find the Falcon Armor and Gaea Armor which are both...underwhelming. Both significantly reduce your offensive power and options. But the Falcon Armor can let you fly around wily-nily which is admittedly kind of neat and the Gaea Armor is sooooo slow, doesn't let you use sub-weapons but you can stand on spikes...yeah. I used the Fourth Armor during my entire playthrough because of how good it was. I think maybe if you had to assemble the Fourth Armour and were given the other armors in the beginning them progression wouldn't of been super messed up. Completely bizarre choice to start you with the best armor. But yeah, that's kind of where I'm at with this game. Just eternally confused with the decisions they went with. Especially coming off of the hotness of X4. X4 was sort of a testament to how good a Mega Man game could by being straight-forward. This is the exact opposite of that statement. And I think it gets worse from here. Zero is better at least. Story: The Space Colony of EURASIA is going to fall onto the EARTH and kill everything in 16 hours. This is one of the only Mega Man games where I had a sense of the stakes since it was a bit more than just "robots going wild". Also a lot of the Mavericks aren't even Mavericks yet. They all have decent dialogue before the fight that clues you in on their mindset and feelings on things. Those hilarious cutscenes were done away with unfortunately, instead replaced with lengthy text boxes. Also now we get some dialogue during levels from Alia! A lot of dialogue. Like a lot. And most of it is explaining gameplay mechanics that players likely should have figured out organically. It's pretty bad. Also who the hell is Alia anyway? Who is Douglas? Who is Signas?? Why does he look exactly like Colonel?? I know Iris has 0 agency or character in MMX4 but at LEAST I knew she was Colonel's brother and that she didn't want them to fight. It was something. Whatever. Sigmas back. Woo. This guy almost makes me miss Dr. Wily. The idea of Zero becoming a Maverick is kind of cool at least. Also Zero's whole campaign is cooler since he has much colder interactions. I actually did some digging and theres a lot of interesting story stuff happening depending on if the Enigma Succeeds or not. Only issue is that these events happen based on a percentage and I played through the game twice getting the items to max out those chances and neither happened. So I don't know how many times CAPCOM want me to play this game to see different scenes but I'm cutting it at 2. Graphics: MMX5 is a step down in quality from X4 in my opinion. A lot of sprites and assets look kind of crusty, almost as if they were rushed. There's a section in Firefly's stage where you climb this big flight of stairs, a concept ripped straight from MMX4. But this time they completely messed up the perspective of the stairs and it looks SO BAD. I cannot believe that anybody on the team let that slide. Sound: Music actually goes pretty hard, I'll give it that. Extra: There's the items as usual. I mentioned why they're stupid in the earlier section so see above. Favorite Thing: The checkpoint and continue system is so good there isn't even a use for lives. Which is baller as fuck because it is 2023 and I do not have the time to be constantly restarting entire stages. Not My Favorite Thing: Hidden Block Intro Jumpscare.