Shantae: Risky’s Revenge is a mediocre 2D metroidvania. Originally made for the DSI, it shows; the levels always feel a bit cramped and the whole game feels rather zoomed in, as if it was originally made for a small screen – which it was.
The first of the modern Shantae games, it is a very simple and straightforward thing – you play as Shantae, you whip stuff with your hair, you can turn into three different animals over the course of the game (a monkey which can wall jump, a big stompy elephant that can break blocks, and a mermaid that can swim) and you go through three dungeons plus some miscellaneous other areas.
The whole game feels really small, because, ultimately, it is; 100%ing this took under six hours, which is quite short for a modern Metroidvania. And yet, honestly, this game being longer would have been bad; it doesn’t really have a huge amount of variety, and it only really has four bosses (though you fight one of them twice). Indeed, even at its length, it still felt like a very significant amount of time was just going back through areas that I’d already beaten because the quick travel points were often in less convenient places than they should have been.
And really, that’s kind of the game in general; the gameplay isn’t terrible, but it isn’t very good either. It’s very mediocre on the whole. The bosses are very simple, perhaps too simple, and the enemies are pretty straightforward as well, without a lot of variety – there’s less than a dozen types in the game, and that’s being generous. The game isn’t nearly as funny as the sequels are. Even the graphics are a bit ugly; the actual sprites are fine, but Shantae and her friends don’t look great and the text boxes are pretty mediocre looking.
All in all, the game is pretty meh. I can’t even really recommend it to people who liked the other Shantae games, because it is pretty primitive-feeling.
1.5