Berserk Boy Review

It will be no surprise to anyone to find out that I was super excited to try out Berserk Boy, side-scrolling platformers are my favourite genre! It looked like it took inspiration from the popular Mega Man series that I love, but it also looked quite different from that franchise. The game was developed and published by BerserkBoy Games — you can tell they have a lot of faith in this title since their game and company share the same name! Right off the bat, we are greeted with a fully animated intro that looks great. It is obvious that a lot of time was spent on this. Before you start the game, you are asked an important question: do you want to play the modern version that allows you infinite retries, or would you prefer the retro experience where you have a set amount of lives and go up against stronger enemies?

The game takes place in 21XX. The humans here have been fighting against evil manifestations of Dark Energy called The Shades for centuries. Powerful orbs aided the humans in their fight, giving some of them superhuman abilities. These individuals formed The Resistance and were humanity’s last line of defence. As time went on, they got stronger, and the Berserk Orbs appeared less frequently, eventually fading away into history and then myth. Some fringe scientists have dedicated their lives to finding these long-lost objects. We meet our purple-haired hero, named Kei, and his childhood friend, the teal-haired girl, named Dizzie. She is known as one of the best minds in the area, and Kei is known as one of the best teleporters, so they are going to put these skills to use by joining the Resistance. This is their last day of freedom before starting their service, as tomorrow they will be going on their first mission.

Before their mission officially starts, we meet Dr. Genos. He is a scientist who was working on researching these orbs, but his thirst for knowledge quickly turned into an obsession. Originally, he wanted to help humanity, but now his plans have changed, and he has decided to reshape and restore the planet on his own. His plan is to find all of these Berserk Orbs and use their power to take out the Resistance and anyone else standing in his way. Dizzie’s ability to trace these large signatures of orb energy makes her incredibly useful to him, so he kidnaps her.

Working on the research with Dr. Genos was Fiore — he’s a large red bird who saw what he was up to and stole one of the orbs before the scientist could take it. This orb has a special attraction to Kei and merges with him. This gives Kei a physical suit created from pure energy. This special power is what makes Berserk Boy a lot different from your regular Mega Man-style platformer. Instead of shooting at your enemies, you bash into them, attaching an electric tether that you send a lighting pulse through to do big damage. Tether multiple enemies together to hit them all at the same time and get big combo points. If you collect enough orange orbs, labelled with the letter B, your Berserk meter will fill, and once it’s at its max you can unleash a strong Berserk attack against your enemy.

Kei and Fiore return to the home base of the Resistance, and the commander has the two of you team up to secure all the Berserk Orbs that remain. You will be exploring New Hope City, the Frozen Temple, the Abandoned Labyrinth, the Sky Fort, and the Dark Fortress. Each area has three different missions to play through, where you are fighting against The Shades before you face a boss who has one of these special Berserk Orbs. Once defeated, Kei will merge with the orb, gaining a special ability to use on your journey. There are five different forms that you can unlock and use in the stages. Your first form is the Lighting Berserk Form, followed by the Flame Drill Form, the Ice Kuna Formi, the Soaring Wind Form, and finally, the Mine Buster Form. The cool thing is that each mission you play requires you to use all the different abilities; they won’t just sit there unused. Some areas require you to tunnel through dirt or into the ground to get past spikes others require you to fly using your wind form or hit a gate with your kunai to open it. This game is full of challenging platforming that is sure to make you frustrated at times, you will have to rely on muscle memory to learn what obstacles and enemies are standing in your way.

Each stage you play is divided into sections, with checkpoints placed that allow you to teleport between them. This allows you to backtrack to areas easily when you have the required ability or power-up to access the sections that you weren’t able to get to before that have kidnapped resistance members to rescue, blue orbs with lighting symbols on them that are used to upgrade your Berserk outfit, and large medals that give you extra points and unlock other things in the game. Most stages have multiple routes, so it's easy to miss a lot of the hidden things, so it's worth teleporting to discover what else you might not have found on your playthrough.

The controls in Berserk Boy are incredibly tight and responsive. It makes it easy to switch between all your different forms on the fly by clicking one button to swap through the different options. I am playing on PC using an Xbox controller, and I had no issues jumping, attacking, or utilising the other abilities available to me. Being able to chain jumps and dashes worked great for getting over large pits of spikes and getting to areas you couldn’t reach with a normal jump. I never felt like it was the controls that were the problem when I would die; it was all me and the poor decisions I would make.

When you complete a mission, you are shown a report that displays the amount of time it took you to finish, how many medals you found, the number of combos you had, and the number of times you died. This really stinks because each death will take 10,000 points off of your total score, and based on this, you are given a grade. I had a lot of not-great marks; one time, I even had negative points! If you want, at any point in the game, you can go back and replay any of the missions that you had played previously and try to improve your score or collect more orbs to spend on upgrading your suit to learn new abilities and improve its stats. It is worth the time to get abilities like the double dash; it will help you through all the different missions!

The visuals look great and remind me of other Super Nintendo-era platformers, and the other animated cutscenes feel like they are right out of a cartoon; they are very well done. I like how different all the different areas looked; I just wish there was a bigger variety of enemies in the game. It felt like the same ones would appear no matter which of the areas you were exploring. The music is upbeat, catchy, and never feels repetitive. I never felt like I had to turn the sound off because the soundtrack was grating.

I’ve had a great time playing Berserk Boy. To beat the final boss, it took me around 15 hours. I haven’t collected everything that you can find in the game to get up to 100%, so doing that will definitely add more play time on top of that. There was only one issue I had found, where I discovered a glitch that had me falling through the floor into oblivion, but other than that one little thing, there were no issues. If you are a fan of platformers like the aforementioned Mega Man and want a challenging yet rewarding time, this is a title to check out. I especially appreciate how the game makes use of every single ability that you have in all the missions; it never felt like the orbs were useless. This was one of the things that made it look different from a lot of the other platformers I have played; smashing into multiple enemies to chain all your attacks together was incredibly satisfying!