I finally got a chance to sit down and give this one a spin. Zan and I raced it last night. Overall I was highly impressed with the game. While the graphics (backgrounds exempt) and story may leave a lot to be desired, the level design, stage gimmicks, and enemy design (gameplay) were really top rate. I find it even more impressive that you, GoldwaterDLS, were basically the entire core team.
It is, gameplay wise, the highest quality Megaman fan game I've played in the last few years at least.
The amount of options to change the way the game works is also remarkable. For the race with Zan we ended up doing mostly normal, spikes to MM2, and slide to Strong. That felt most like the official games.
During the course of the game I didn't experience any game breaking glitch, much less hardly any glitches at all. This is really impressive, especially since you're basically the only programmer on the game.
The arsenal was extremely useful, which I was very pleased to see. The game’s difficulty warranted most of it. It really put me through the paces.
I think the game ended somewhat anticlimactically though. Death man was really final boss worthy. He was so out of balance, it took more E Tanks to bring him down than any other boss for me. While in comparison the actual last boss required only one, and it was more or a precaution than a need.
I liked how the saved robots through the game end up filling the roles of Eddie and Protoman traditionally had in the old games. It really made you feel like you had buddies coming to help out. I also like the idea to include Tango, but for the difficulty and pace of the game I found Tango to be completely useless sans detecting where invisible ledges are. Speaking of Protoman; where is he? I kind of expected him to show up with all the other characters chipping in.
Graphically the backgrounds were really great for the most part. Fuse man stands out as really noticeably lower quality than the rest though. If you’re going to make changes, that one really needs it. It’s a shame the character sprites and cutscene art was really bad though. I think it would be worth looking into getting someone to give those an overhaul. You really shine in background art and map layout though.
Overall a fantastic game. It’s one I can recommend to many people I know. Be proud in your work. You earned it.