7.3/10 – 4 hours to beat
Review written on 2/9/2026
TLDR: Hits like a classic game should, with creativity and fun level designs that are a blast to play. Fun and smooth run & gun gameplay with lots of options to platform and fight how you want, alongside lots of difficulty options. Along with these classic game vibes come the baggage of retro game style bullshit, with some unnecessarily brutal platforming (Bounce Man stage…ask my therapist…), abundantly respawning enemies, and unintuitive boss patterns. Not to mention no way to buy items in bulk.
(ARE YOU SURE? TA-DAA–ARE YOU SURE? TA-DAA–YO MEGA–).
The game gives you lots of nice tools to make the experience more accessible, such as equipment to strengthen your combat and platforming, a ton of difficulty levels to cater to all players, and robo animal abilities to help you get through the grueling platforming when it gets too much such as Beat the bird saving you from pits, and Rush’s Coil jump and horizontal jet. Things like the latter abilities were present since the first Mega Man games, but it’s nice that they’re there and easier to use than ever. Makes the game approachable for everyone, since Mega Man is oftentimes a surprise difficulty spike to many willing to try it. This allows more people to enjoy the fun run & gun gameplay and super creative level designs and gimmicks. That’s a win in my book.
Mega Man 11 doesn’t deviate much from the classic formula, and that’s largely by design. You still fight a bunch of Robo masters, each with a weakness to each other’s powers, then go do some Dr. Wily stages then fight the big Wilster himself. The addition of the Double Gear system is a small, tiny mixup to gameplay, letting you deal some more damage or slow down tricky platforming. It’s nothing super crazy, but that probably wasn’t the aim. A drawback of this adherence to the classic formula is the baggage the devs at Capcom have decided to keep in the game. Brutal platforming that starts out fun but wears on you, enemies respawning the moment you move off screen from their original location, taking tons of damage from brushing past enemies, unintuitive attack patterns with most bosses, it’s all there. On top of this, the brutal platforming eats into the clever level design by making them a bit too tiring. This is specifically the case with Bounce Man’s stage. This one has a super cool concept of most of the platforms and walls being bouncy, reshaping the way you approach platforming and combat. There are some sections that are just way too tiring to attempt, where you have to time your bounces perfectly to avoid being sent to the start of the gauntlet.
My hands were in agony after some of these and my brain was smoother than a damn race track. Just brutal.
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