So I’ve been playing Kamen Rider Club: Gekitotsu Shocker Land. This is one of those games I had played for about 10 minutes when I received it and then never touched again. I have now touched it again.
Wait, that didn't come out right...
Anyway, the game is based on the Kamen Rider franchise, which is huge in Japan. I’m not entirely sure where to begin researching this stuff. I looked up a wiki article on “Shocker” and it’s like a tiny book’s worth of content. The tl;dr version is that they wear masks, ride bikes, and beat up bad guys. So, in this game, you wear masks, occasionally ride bikes, and often beat up bad guys. You also spend a whole lot of time farming gold, but I’ll get to that later.
The game starts you out by having you choose one of three riders. The characters each control a bit differently and they each have their own set of stages, which is a nice touch. It seems like a normal platformer, but almost right away you bump your head on the bottom of a platform and your head flattens out. A goofy tune starts playing as you mash buttons to make it stop, but nothing you do seems to matter. A few seconds later, regardless of your actions, the tune stops and you’re back to normal. It’s a cute effect but, over the course of time, rather annoying.
Jumping remains odd throughout most of the game. Your player tends to jump a lot more vertically than he does horizontally. This introduces another of the game’s cute mechanics -- you can grab onto almost any ledge or wall. And you will, since that’s how levels are designed. Most platforms are just out reach, forcing to instead jump near them (without bumping your head!) and then mashing on the jump button to make the rider grab on. You then continue to mash on the jump button (seven times; yes, I counted) until you’re able to climb up onto it. This one is actually not as annoying as it sounds. It’s annoying at first since it’s so different from the norm, but I found it to be an interesting and original mechanic.
And what of action? Well, you can press the “B” button to attack. This will make the rider punch downward and bang his fist into the ground. A bawawawa sound effect plays as the rider’s eyes bulge in and out in pain. If you want to hit an enemy, you’ll have to jump and attack. You still punch downward, but it seems to be effective so long as the enemy touches your fist. If you miss the punch, you will very likely get pulled into a fight.
And what of the fights? Fights take place on a separate screen. They are fairly basic, letting you choose to fight, use a technique, use an item, or run. When attaching, you jam on the ‘A’ button to build up an attack gauge. You move to the right as your enemy moves to the left, and when you collide you attack. It’s comical, but fairly repetitive. The special techniques show a brief animation and then do a powerful attack. Items work similarly.
This is all well and good, but what do you do in the game? The aim is to collect a bunch of money. At the end of each stage is some kind of scale that you jump on. If you’ve collected enough money then a door opens and you can go on to the next level. Not enough money? Get back into the stage and farm more money.
And that’s where the game gets boring. I had some fun trying to find the quickest way to get money (finding a good spawn point and timing my attacks such that I don’t get drawn into a fight), but that did get old pretty quickly. The thing is, though, I can deal with repetitive. What I can’t deal with is losing all of my progress based entirely on chance.
This is what killed the game for me. You only have one character and one life. When you die, the game is over. It is possible to get another character, but you need to raise a lot of gold (more than is required to finish the stage) in order to buy the character. What if you get into a fight and one of the enemies is a lot stronger than you? It’s pretty much game over. Now that’s annoying.
I had some fun with the game overall. I think it was worth the time I put into it. If I could continue or at least had multiple lives then I could probably play on, but I just don’t see the game as being worth a longer time investment when it can flush all your progress down the drain at its whim.
