Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider from JoyMasher and The Arcade Crew is an old-school style 2D action game ready to rock you on Nintendo Switch. Check our Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider review!

 

Do you like retro games? Sidescrolling games? Mean bosses? Then Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider from JoyMasher and The Arcade Crew has you covered. Retro-style games are clearly here to stay. They have made a huge resurgence over the last few years, and when done properly, a retro game can look and play amazingly. Moonrider looks brilliant and plays incredibly well. It certainly has 16-bit Sega Genesis/Mega Drive vibes. The controls are nice and tight and very responsive. It was a fun game to play, so let’s dive in and discover more about this little gem!

You play as an escaped robot ninja who fights back against his villainous masters in a cyberpunky-futuristic world. It gave me some Robocop vibes, as your cyborg takes on its creators to try and save everyone before it’s too late. You will be running, jumping, slashing, and hacking enemies. While doing so, you’ll have to be careful of hazardous deathtraps along the way. There is a lot of platforming, jumping from wall to wall, ziplining, and more. The gameplay feels very fluid when a lot is happening on the screen with no slowdown. Moonrider is pretty much flawless.

 

The boss battles are a big part of the experience. You’re going to struggle a bit and die a few times until you learn the movement and attack patterns of each boss. While the first boss battle is very easy, every subsequent boss will certainly test your skills. However, you don’t have to struggle since, as you play the game, you will find upgrade chips that will give you certain buffs and effects that can help you progress. They’re totally optional. You don’t have to use them if you don’t want to! This is an option that will be welcomed by those of you who want to go into this one with a higher challenge. But if you just want to play the game without the extra stress, then there is no shame in using these upgrades as you find them!

The length of Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider will greatly depend on what you want from the gamer. If you are a completionist, then you might want to do another run to find all the upgrades. Each level has more than one path to take, so if you choose to take one path, you’ll need to replay that stage to take another one, so there is some replayability in that sense. However, if you are a one-run playthrough kind of gamer and want to finish the game and move on to a new experience, then you can definitely complete this in, say, a couple of hours or so, just like we used to do for games back in the day!

 

Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider is a fun game. Its graphics are beautiful, the controls are tight, it has challenging bosses and even upgrades to boot – but only if you want to use them! I have nothing but high praise for the game. It is definitely worth your time and money, and it’s out on Nintendo Switch at a $16.99 price.

Disclaimer
This Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by The Arcade Crew.