Why you will love and hate the pixel game “Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider”.

Already after the first few minutes it becomes clear what this game wants from us: our nostalgia is piqued and we are reminded of the 16-bit era, when video games still had a simple 2D look and the difficulty was high to hide, that the season was rather short-lived. The frustration with the game is actually pre-programmed, but the fascination of surrendering to a wave of emotions like in the 90s is stronger.

A cyborg ninja seeks revenge

The story of “Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider” is pretty crap and certainly fits on a beer mat: in a future version, a company has built a totalitarian state with an army of super soldiers. When the newly-imagined ninja warrior Moonrider is brought to life to actually serve as a superweapon for those in power, the cyborg promptly takes on a bad conscience and with a vengeance sets out to visit its creators and set people free.

As robot ninja, we snipe and shoot from left to right, encountering all sorts of related super soldiers, giant robot antagonists and other wonderfully bizarre metallic creatures. So that the new hero does not always have to attack the villains with the same cutting and stabbing weapons, there are individual modification chips hidden in the levels, which give the Moonrider new skills that are sometimes badly needed to progress smoothly at all.

An audiovisual retro party

Eight levels await your liberation, almost all of which are freely accessible at the beginning. Do I want to destroy everything in the city first, do I take to the air to clean up there, or am I more attracted to a wooded area where various skill tests await me? The players are free to choose.

During the personal revenge campaign, there’s also a wonderfully simple, almost stupid row-shooting sequence where everything on screen is blasted away and reaction skills are tested. And as befits an action platformer of yesteryear, there are of course screen-filling bosses, beautiful pixel explosions and a soundtrack that will make any synthwave heart beat faster.

Audiovisually, as a purist you immediately feel at home and you feel in every scene that the makers have put a lot of love into it and have focused on authenticity.

Frustrating and heavy

To perfect this gaming experience of the time, a spicy difficulty setting was promptly installed to prevent the game from being finished in less than two hours.

While the character can take several hits, there are many sections to remember if you want to make it to the boss with enough energy. Again, patience must be exercised and the movements carefully studied. There are a few save points here and there after you die, but if you rely on these luxuries, you’ll never see the end of the game.

Really biting and very frustrating are some skill passages where you have to jump and land with pinpoint accuracy and the game shows no mercy. Although the solution to the riddle lies in a lot of practice and repetition, the chance of frustration increases enormously and can sometimes lead to a certain part of the game having to be started over and over again.

These playful features certainly bring back the old feelings of the past and the authenticity is happy to pat itself on the back, but the entertaining retro action becomes unnecessarily tough and ugly.

It’s love hate

Conclusion: I love and hate “Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider” at the same time. There are many great moments in this video game that delight my retro heart and at the same time I regularly shout it out because so many difficult game parts frustrate me so much.

While I can slip through some parts of the game beautifully, there are times when I feel like it takes forever to progress because the game wants me to make precise character movements. At times like this you just want to grab the developers personally and shake them up.

The loving pixel optics in combination with the classic soundtrack and the simple game principle make me try again and again until the very last boss has fallen. But the road to it takes a lot of nerves.

Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider will be available on January 12 for Nintendo Switch, Playstation 5, Playstation 4 and PC. Suitable from 12 years.