I’ve played some really good Ninja Gaiden-inspired games this generation, like The Messenger and Cyber Shadow. I’ve also played some great new-school Mega Man experiences like Mighty Gunvolt Burst and, err, Mega Man 11. However, Gravity Circuit might just be the best of the lot.
This is the kind of game where everything just *feels* right, where you know you’re in good hands before even finishing the prologue level. Your robot hero Kai, the eponymous Gravity Circuit, is a joy to control, with an extremely cool moveset that lets you pull off truly awesome stunts without it being overly complex or autistic. You can wall jump like a champ, hookshot onto roofs and swing around like a non-nigger Spider-Man, dive kick into enemies, and even knock projectiles and defeated enemies into other foes. Not to mention that the mere act of running and jumping just feels super good. The one questionable aspect of the gameplay is combat usually forcing you to get up close to enemies and punch them, with even generic enemies usually being just a bit too tanky for my liking, slowing down the game unnecessarily much if you, like me, want to kill every last one of them. I mean, why does Kai need to hit some dumb robot bat 3 times before managing to finally kill it? Then again, you certainly don’t *need* to approach the game in this way, as the level design and your moveset accommodates many different playstyles.
And indeed, the levels themselves are brilliantly designed, full of enjoyable platforming challenges, interesting mechanics and creative obstacles. There are also plenty of secrets to find, in hiding spots that actually make sense and feel fair, even the couple of ones I struggled to uncover. The levels are also really varied and imaginative – sure, you got certain somewhat standard levels for a game of this kind, like a mine, a snowy mountain, and a high-tech facility (still good stages by the way, don’t get me wrong), but you also got stuff like a highway chase level, a musical level centered a robot idol’s concert, and best of all, a level set in cyberspace itself, with enough neat ideas and unique mechanics to easily fill 2-3 regular levels.
Pretty much everything else is top-notch as well – the retro graphics are clean, colorful, stylish and very appealing, looking just like your favorite NES games look through rose-tinted Nostalgia Goggles. Fittingly for a Mega Man-inspired game, the soundtrack is full of banging songs that greatly contribute to making your gaming experience so enjoyable. And while Gravity Circuit is far from massive, it boasts a decent enough length for a Mega Man-inspired game, taking some 4-5 hours to beat the first time around, with plenty of replay value to boot. After beating the game on Normal difficulty, I actually went right back and beat it again, this time on Hard, which I very rarely bother to do (Metroid Dread being the last game prior to Gravity Circuit to achieve such a feat).
Even in terms of story Gravity Circuit goes above and beyond, with surprisingly deep lore (perhaps keeping the door open to a sequel/prequel?) and a number of pretty big twists. There’s also this really nice touch where after each level, you can actually get some backstory on the Robot Master you just fought, what he or she was like before getting corrupted. These are quite the melancholy moments, given how you’ve had to destroy the robot in question (each one a former friend and ally of yours), and the fact that the backstories don’t shy away from mentioning negative personality traits of the robots just make them come across as all that more genuine and authentic. Definitely the kind of feature that any Mega Man-like game would benefit from, since it really helps flesh out the bosses as characters. Even beyond that, I quite enjoyed the game’s robot world, and found the various characters populating the hub world very likable.
My problems with Gravity Circuit are nitpicks more than anything. The opportunity to buy and equip various special abilities and enhancements is certainly a cool feature, but the abilities themselves are not very well balanced – getting an extra jump for example is obviously an amazing boon, as is a dramatic buff to your durability, and when such game-changers end up competing with various other abilities that are mildly situationally beneficial at best, there’s not much actual competition to speak of. The money you use to buy stuff is also so plentiful that you don’t really have to ever prioritize what to buy, you can just buy everything available for the hell of it and get the in-game achievements. It’s hardly a meaningful resource to manage, and picking up money therefore feels a lot less rewarding than it should. The Screws in Mega Man 11 were handled way better.
Moreover, I do feel that a number of the bosses have attacks that are so hard to react to that their fights often come down to just 1) getting favorable attack patterns and 2) getting into a good position to just whale on them, despite having to take some hits in the process. Even on Hard mode this proved a viable strategy more often than it should. I much prefer the approach of games like Metroid Dread, where it feels like you have a fair shot at avoiding every single boss attack, at the cost of bosses hitting really hard and having a lot of health. To be fair, some of the later bosses in Gravity Circuit do lean increasingly in this direction, so it's primarily a problem with the Robot Masters. Still, even on Hard the game isn’t overly difficult, and certainly more forgiving than something like Cyber Shadow, with the penalty for missing jumps or touching spikes being low, as well as checkpoints being reasonably generous, and even healing you for a small cost (and as I already mentioned, money is excessively plentiful in this game). I actually appreciate this somewhat more moderate difficulty, since it encourages you to play more around with your awesome moveset rather than focusing on optimal play. At the same time, the game seems to be at least partially designed for speedrunning, and the potential skill ceiling strikes me as extremely high.
Now, with a game dealing exclusively with robots, you’d have been justified in worrying about the devs pushing “inclusive” genderblob language. Indeed, I have seen several obnoxious JewTube faggots insisting on referring to individual robots using singular they instead of “it”. Thankfully, Gravity Circuit is completely free of this bullshit. Unless I’ve missed something, every single robot in the game is referred to as either male or female, and I couldn’t identify any other form of inappropriate agenda-pushing or fagspeak either. As such, its Based Morality score is Neutral, which is all one can ask for, really – no poz, just lots of robo ninja fun.
Indeed, Gravity Circuit in general delivers pretty much everything you could want from a game like this. It’s tons of fun throughout, and a game I’d recommend to pretty much anyone.
