I recently beat Mahou Warrior, and it’s a pretty good Mega Man clone. Although levels are longer than most Mega Man levels (and you never get powers from defeated bosses), the level design is generally easier, so if you’ve been hesitant to play the series because of its difficulty (or maybe you were turned off after hearing about the grindy achievements shoehorned into Legacy Collection), this free fangame is a good place to start. Even if a boss’s pattern is abrupt enough that you die on your first try, you can always just use an “increase atk until you die or beat the level” item on your second try and beat the boss no problem while still having more than enough money to buy another one afterward.

Plus, this game thankfully does away with the lives system, so you never have to worry about being forced to replay parts of the stage you’ve already gotten past (unless the game crashes, which only happened to me once when I disconnected and reconnected my wireless Xbox 360 controller). Instead, the punishment for dying is the soulslike “take away half your currency, but you get it back if you reach the next checkpoint without dying again” fare, but even this isn’t as big a deal as it may seem since 1) there were only a few places where I died more than once, 2) there’s plenty more money laying around each stage to make it up within two or three levels (and it’ll only take that long because of how much you’ve already accumulated), and 3) there isn’t much you can buy in the first place, and you can only carry two consumable items at a time anyway, so even if you die three times in one place, you’ll still end up with enough money to buy back the one item you used in the level.

There are some problems to keep in mind going in, though. The forest boss has an attack that’s hard to figure out how to dodge even after you know what’ll happen. The lava stage has you climb and fall from a row of ladders while being shot at from above; it was the only time I used the “20 seconds of invincibility” item because I couldn’t figure out how to avoid getting hit there. The gravity ship has one part where the “horizon gradient” background tiles are placed next to solid tiles and directly above “starry outer space” background tiles to make the former look like solid tiles (thankfully this is right after a checkpoint), and the level’s boss sends a ghost that jumps when you do, but only the first time, and it turns around shortly after it passes you rather than at a fixed point in the arena. The tower levels reuse the “trap yourself in a bubble to go upward” gimmick with more spikes, but the game never tells you that you can shoot to pop the bubble before hitting a solid tile, and not knowing that makes those segments harder than they were probably intended to be. Lastly, the final boss’s second phase has the boss be above where you can shoot around 3/5ths of the time, which is annoying. It does mean that this is possibly the only time where the health refill consumable is more useful than the temporary invincibility consumable, though.

Oh, and the secret level you’re told about in the credits is fine, but its boss is disappointingly simple and the only thing you get from it is a permanent attack upgrade (which is kinda useless after you’ve beaten every other level), so it’s really just for if you like the game and want another level to play through.

Still, despite those problems, it’s a pretty good game, and it’s free. Recommended.