Hydorah was really close to being a high-quality SHMUP (and a free one at that!), but it has one major deal-breaker: you can only save five times per playthrough, even though there are 11+ levels. Individually, the levels are rather well made, challenging, and fun, but as soon as I tried to ration my saves, the game would become an exercise in tedium as I’d end up having to replay levels I’d already beaten just because I got game over on the following stage. I finally called it quits around the halfway mark at the WARCORE, an extra-long boss at the end of an already-longer-than-average level (featuring two mini-bosses, one of which you can only barely kill in time since the auto-scroll keeps pushing you to the wall). I’m pretty sure I reached the boss’s final phase, but a single mistake means you have to redo the whole boss fight with a weaker and weaker gun until all your lives are gone (and this game’s bosses take way too long to kill unless your gun is fully powered up). Still, I might’ve been able to forgive that and keep trying if it weren’t for the saving issue.

I did finally beat another good game, though:

This is the Mega Man DOS Remake, and it has the same controls you’d expect from a Mega Man fangame besides buster-charging: left/right move, A jumps, X shoots, and down+jump slides. Physics are also accurate to the main games, except underwater jumping isn’t slowed down. I’m slightly disappointed that it reuses official Mega Man tracks instead of using Kackebango’s original Mega Man DOS soundtrack, but oh well.

Level design is pretty good. The only time I was blindsided by a new enemy was in the lower-left stage, where the dev decided a downward, vertical segment was a good place to introduce the Hard-Man-style bear traps. Besides that, the game is pretty good at introducing new things safely. There were a couple areas that combined two different timing hazards that didn’t seem synced properly, but the rest of the levels do a decent job at making sure everything can be avoided and dealt with using just the Mega Buster, and any damage/death is your own fault (except one part in the fourth castle stage where a sawblade-thrower was completely covered by foreground objects). There are even some improvements over the official games, like knockback being almost completely gone and there being background tiles that indicate where exactly the disappearing blocks will spawn. EDIT: The game even goes out of its way to make sure you can shoot the MM2 small frogs when they’re on the same platform as you, which you couldn’t do in MM2 (your shots would just go over them).

The only part I didn’t like on a conceptual level was the top-left stage’s gimmick: it starts off fine by having fixed locations where your jump height is reduced or increased, but after the halfway point, it has drones speed across the top/bottom of the screen, carrying these zones with them. This means you’ll inevitably come across a wall too high to jump over, and you’ll just have to sit there and wait for the right drone to come along. Plus, you have a very small window to make your jump; mistime it, and it’ll be a normal jump, which is extra bad during segments where you have to jump from a switch bomb and can’t wait for the next drone before it explodes and you fall into the pit.

That was the first level I tried since I always start at the top-left, but when I got game over there, I decided to play the others and save it for last. However, when I replayed it after beating the other Robot Masters, I noticed something odd: the sky was evening instead of day, and when I reached the halfway point, I was sent down into a completely different level chunk than the one mentioned in the previous paragraph! Yeah, turns out the levels are different depending on what order you tackle them in, and this particular one ended up being easier than the early-game segment since you don’t have to worry about waiting on the drones (this one has the up/down ceiling crusher instead).

Also, as you beat the levels, four of them will get Doc Robot icons on them. There are two main differences between these Doc Robots and the ones from Mega Man III, both of which are improvements: 1) they aren’t a carbon-copy of another Robot Master’s pattern (some of them even have TWO bosses’ weapons), and 2) they’re completely optional; beating them just gives you bonus passive upgrades (like extra special-weapon ammo, more recharge from weapon energy items, auto weapon-energy distribution, and a bullet-split for the Mega Buster). The only downside is, unlike Mega Man III remixing the levels for the Doc Robots, these levels are exactly the same as before; you just have to figure out that the red barricades–which look no different than the last time you played through the stage–now suddenly open to a new part of the level when you touch them, and it’s in these segments where you’ll find the Doc Robots.

The other four Robot Master stages have collectible letters. Get them all, and you’ll unlock the ninth Robot Master stage (overwriting the top-right stage on the stage select). The level itself is a bit bland in parts, but the boss makes up for it by tossing a bunch of projectiles around that are hard to react to on your first go. The power you get isn’t all that special in and of itself, but it’s the weakness for a few of the bosses (particularly in the castle stages).

Speaking of bosses, they’re generally okay, but there are a couple that go way too far. The boss on the bottom-left has a double health bar and three distinct phases on top of some pretty cheap attacks, making it by far the hardest Robot Master in the game. I only used two E-tanks in my playthrough, and one of them was against that boss. The other one was against the boss of the fourth castle stage: it starts off promising with the wall tiles turning into orbs and just staying there, making you think you have time to react to them, but then they’ll suddenly bolt to another location without even showing you a preview of the path they’ll take. Plus, its second form shoots a three-way projectile with a different trajectory for each shot each time, making it super difficult to react or avoid them. Then, it has a third phase where it’ll move faster and faster around the arena, once again not showing you what path it’ll take, meaning you can’t react to it. This isn’t the final boss, but it’s the hardest, cheapest one.

Overall, the game is pretty good, and it’s an example of why I’m still a Mega Man fan. I recommend it, even if you’re someone who has never played a Mega Man game before or you’ve heard some negative things about the franchise. It may not be the best Mega Man game, but it’s free and it shows off a lot of the franchise’s good qualities. You can download it here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=618780083 (scroll down until you see “Windows standard: DOWNLOAD[packedrat.net]” and “Windows zipped: DOWNLOAD[packedrat.net]”). Small disclaimer: I played v2.13, not the latest build. Hopefully, some of the issues I encountered have been fixed.

EDIT: Another disappointment is that you have to beat all the castle stages in one run, but the high quality means that isn’t too big an issue.