Login
I’ll start out with the negatives. First off, the game is WAY too short. I beat it in ten minutes without too much of a problem. Secondly, the game is WAY too easy. You will cruise through every single level in the game without an issue (aside from some unresponsive control issues, but I’ll get to that later) until you reach the final level. It’s like they made the game super easy and then got to the last level and said, “We have poor jumping mechanics in the game, so let’s have the last level include a lot of platform jumping!...Wait, too easy. Let’s have fireballs shooting randomly during the platform jumping, so the player gets burned to a crisp while they’re already struggling to make a jump!” And that last boss fight isn’t just lame (the other bosses were kinda cool...why wasn’t the boss of England the final boss?), but it’s insanely difficult. If the controls were more responsive the final boss probably wouldn’t be so bad, but they aren’t...So, when you finally win, you feel as if it was based more on luck than skill.
I mentioned that the controls aren’t very responsive, so I’ll cover that a little more. The jumping in particular is a nightmare. If you tap the jump button, it’s sometimes a toss-up whether you’ll actually do a small jump or if you’ll jump as high as possible. This isn’t terrible for most of the game, but in England and New York precise platforming is an important part of the level...So, it’s easy to get a cheap death simply because you jumped way too high when you were really just trying for a little hop. The rest of the controls aren’t terribly bad, but the jumping will really get on the nerves of some folks.
But, there is good here. You do get three weapons to use at your disposal; a gun, bombs, and a boomerang. The gun is the default weapon. Every time you go on a different screen, you’ll have your gun, even if you had prepared the boomerang in the previous room for an upcoming boss fight, when you enter the room of the boss, you’ll be equipped with the gun again. It’s a little annoying, but nothing too anger-inducing. The weapons give a little variety to the action, but quite frankly, you won’t likely be using the bombs or boomerang aside from during boss fights. Then there’s the vehicles you drive. Most of the levels you’re in will actually be within a vehicle; airplanes, cars, boats, hot-air balloons, submarines...That cat must have a lot of licenses. But anyway, these vehicle levels are fun and all, but like most other levels, they’re to short. Some of them last only roughly a minute to complete.
Graphically, Puss ‘N Boots is decent. It’s not amongst the best graphics on the NES, but it’s also not amongst the worst. The levels seem to range from looking bland to looking way too busy. Most of the bosses look great (aside from the lame-looking final boss) but most of the regular enemies don’t really look that good. Overall, there’s just average graphics to be found here. The audio, however, is still like how I remember it. It’s pretty enjoyable. They’re not the kind of tunes to get stuck in your head for days, but they are pretty enjoyable. This really seems to be the only aspect of the game that is exactly how I remember it from when I was a child. It’s quite good.
So, after playing this game, a game from my beloved childhood, I’ve come to the sad conclusion that, aside from the soundtrack, it’s nothing like how I remember it to be. While I did enjoy my time with the game to a point, there are just so many flaws that it’s hard for me to give it a better score. Almost everything that I can praise the game for, I can also find a fault in...And yet, I can’t find much good in most of the things that bothered me about the game. There’s just too much bad and too little good in this short, little adventure to justify a higher score, but if you give Puss ‘N Boots a chance, you’ll likely have some fun...But you also may have enough of this ten-minute-long game before you reach the end.
5/10
