Just beat Ninja Senki (not DX, but the free original version), and it’s okay for a free platformer. Controls are fine and level design is decent for the most part, but the game can be pretty repetitive at times (literally using the exact same level chunk & enemy placement multiple times in a row), and level 8 has a bunch of cheap hits, partly because it introduces the three-bullet shooters (who are pretty much never used fairly) and partly because it’s the only one where getting hit by the boss is an instakill because you always get knocked into the pit. Honestly, although I haven’t played the DX version, it looks like it isn’t all that different from the free original, so I’d definitely recommend this one instead, which you can download here: https://ninja-senki.en.uptodown.com/windows/post-download/43818 Just know that it doesn’t save your progress, so you have to beat it in one sitting (it has infinite continues, though).

I also got this game as a gift a couple days ago:

• Mega Man 11
  

  5 hours playtime

  17 of 50 achievements

Besides typical Mega Man controls (jump, slide, charge shot), this platformer introduces the “gear system”: LB temporarily increases your attack power but using it too long weakens you and greatly lowers your fire-rate, and RB slows time down but also slows your own movement as well. As a result, it doesn’t really do anything to alleviate potential cheap hits because if you don’t have enough reaction time to hit the jump button or slide or whatever, you don’t have time to hit the time-slow button, either. Honestly, I forgot it was there most of the time, only remembering when I hit the wrong button while trying to switch weapons (mapped to LT and RT).

Level design is okay for the most part, but there were a few lapses in quality. One of the things Mega Man is known for is introducing new things safely, but Torch Man’s stage fails to do this twice. First of all, the teepees looks like background objects, so when you walk into the first one and take contact damage, you’ll shoot it down and see that no enemy comes out of it. A couple teepees later, you’ll jump up to a platform that’s only a few tiles wide and shoot the teepee down only for an enemy to spawn behind it and jump forward at you, hitting you again! At the very least, the first one should’ve had the enemy so the player knows to be on guard for the rest of them. In that same level are Mash Burners, which constantly shoot flames upward so you can’t get past them without killing them, which causes them to explode. That much is fine, but once again, shortly after they first show up, you’re placed on a small platform with one in front of you (after a drop so you can’t jump back), but the platform isn’t large enough to avoid getting hit by the enemy’s death explosion. It isn’t until several rooms later–past the halfway point–where the game has them walk into a pit and you realize shooting them just once turns their flames off without killing them (they die in only two shots). That would’ve been a good way to introduce them safely…if that had been how they were actually introduced!

Some of the bosses have issues as well. The first I noticed was the mini-boss in Block Man’s stage: it’s too long to jump over, so you have to find a safe zone, but the mini-boss’s four pieces fall in different, seemingly random positions on the screen each time. Even with the time slow power, I couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to avoid getting hit sometimes. The worst is probably Acid Man, though. See, all the Robot Masters get a pattern change when they get low on health, and what Acid Man does is: he dives under the arena where you can’t shoot him, sends a wave towards you that you need to jump over, then–as you’re jumping over the wave–he’ll jump out of the water and hover at the top of the screen (where your Mega Buster also can’t reach), then immediately shoot three shots at you in a row (which are super hard to dodge due to you being right next to the boss when it happens) before diving back under the arena (where–again–you can’t shoot him) and loop the pattern. The only reason I won is because I happened to have his weakness, which can hit him at the top of the screen; I’m pretty sure he’s actually impossible with just the Mega Buster alone.

The Wily fortress was pretty disappointing. Only four levels, and two of them barely have any level to go with their bosses. In fact, the boss-refight stage doesn’t have an exclusive boss (it just ends once the duplicate Robot Masters are defeated), and the first level just reuses the Yellow Devil again (who has no weakness in this game; the wiki says its weakness is the bomb weapon, but I used that against the boss and it only dealt one point of damage!). The first Wily stage also has a lot more background details, making the transparent 8-way-shooting enemies very difficult to notice before they pop out and attack, knocking you into a pit.

However, the most disappointing part of the game are the challenges. All of them (except four) either recycle the main game’s levels with next to no changes, or they recycle the main game’s bosses in some form of boss rush. Worse, 3/4 of the non-recycled challenges are just high-score minigames (one of which is unintuitive because how are you supposed to figure out what the normal enemies’ weaknesses are besides trial and error?), and the final one–the only one that’s worth playing due to being an actual new level–is way too long considering it has no checkpoints (and on top of that, it also ends up recycling the main game’s bosses with no changes!). It’s been a while since I played Mega Man 10, but I distinctly remember that game’s challenges were unique levels. Heck, even Mega Man: Powered Up, for all its flaws, at least had the decency to make most of its challenges original levels, even if a lot of them also have the same checkpoint issue as this game’s lone extra level.

Overall, this one’s hard to recommend. There’s a lot of good things here, but it also has a bunch of problems–some of which run counter to what Mega Man is known for. It especially doesn’t help the game’s case when there are so many free games doing the same thing better (like the Mega Man DOS Remake). The lowest it’s gone for is $10, which is still a bit of a stretch IMO considering the challenges are less than an afterthought (and apparently, hard mode barely changes the level design, unlike Mega Man 10! That was something I liked about that game, and they did away with it here!).