Trophy Review

When I first saw the trailer for Trophy I knew that I had to play it since it looked just like the 8-bit action platformers that I grew up playing. After doing a bit of research I found out that Trophy actually was created to play on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, it just also got a release onto the Xbox One. 8-Bit Legit is a publishing company that is trying to keep retro gaming alive for the current generation of consoles, along with releasing physical titles for the original console. For Trophy, they have teamed up with Gradual Games and The 6502 Collective for a new title that feels just like the games you may have played as a child (depending on your age of course!).

The story in Trophy feels quite familiar, two scientists travelling through space discover Gearus9, a planet full of friendly robots. After befriending the inhabitants There, Jared Sword, one of the scientists decides to leave to go back to Earth with his findings and one of the friendly robots named Beeper. Meanwhile, Xella Quine, the other scientist, decides to stay on Gearus9. After being isolated with no other human contact, Quine slowly goes mad and realises how he can command the robots and make them do his bidding, he proclaims himself as Lord Q with goals to conquer the universe. Sword and Beeper realise that it is up to them to stop him, so using Gearus9 technology they fuse together becoming a being that is part human and part machine called Trophy.

At first glance, Trophy looks just like a Mega Man game. A stage select screen, the layout of the levels, the enemies you come across while navigating the stage, and the fact there is a boss battle at the end of each stage are very reminiscent of a Mega Man title. Even the screen itself displays just like an NES game would with the large black spaces on both sides and parallax scrolling when moving between screens. Since Trophy was made to play on the NES, all the limitations that developers would have experienced in the past are still here, a good example would be the game trying to process all of the enemies and sprites on screen, causing slowdown in areas. The game does not feature saves, but instead a password system. Lucky for us the password isn’t a crazy long one, just five characters.

The character of Trophy controls are similar to the original Mega Man, but there are a few differences. Instead of using an arm cannon weapon, Trophy has hand repulsors, very similar to the ones that Iron Man uses. He can jump higher, which is nice since a lot of the platforms you need to get to are high up and with no extra weapon power-ups you don’t have an item to use to access places that are out of reach. There’s no sliding here, and no ducking, so you'll have to jump to avoid any enemy shots that are incoming. If you try to move out of the way remember that because this is like an old NES game, the enemies will refresh again if you move back too far.

 Playing on the Xbox Series X was neat because it blended the retro gameplay that I love with new elements like achievements. Though during my playthrough I found this part to be quite buggy. I was playing on my profile, but my husband’s account which was also logged in on the machine was showing that he was playing at the same time. He also got achievements even though he had never played before. I also kept getting achievements that I hadn’t earned yet like ones for defeating one boss, two bosses, and even a hat trick one for beating three.

I had reached a bunch of the boss battles, but they were incredibly challenging and with the boss not having a health bar or a flash when you hit them it was difficult to see if I was doing any damage to them. The bosses were very large and it was hard to get to the right spot you had to fire from without taking a large amount of damage. Unfortunately, I found that some of these (the train and quarry stage bosses in particular) just didn’t have a lot of personality compared to some of the other enemies and backgrounds in the stages. Their design just wasn’t super interesting and felt more like an afterthought.

Trophy felt just like an 8-bit action-platformer you would play on the NES so it’s neat being able to play an actual game like that on a new console. It’s hard to not directly compare it to Mega Man, but they did do a good job taking those elements and recreating them here. The difficulty you know from retro games is here, and I’m sure it will take most people a while to beat all the nine stages that are present. It will definitely take some memorisation to get through the obstacles that stand in your way to stop Lord Q and his quest to conquer the galaxy.