DuckTales Remastered is WayForward and Capcom‘s HD remaster of 1989’s DuckTales, one of the best platformers released on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nobody was more excited for this game than I was, but this week’s release begs the question: is DuckTales still awesome, or did WayForward‘s attempts to “improve” the game crash like Launchpad McQuack? I was a big fan of the 80’s animated series, which still holds up rather well, and enjoyed the NES classic (which, also, holds up well). For the most part, this game is identical to the original, with a few tweaks here and there to flesh out the experience. Now, instead of just getting Scrooge McDuck to bounce around on the moon in search of treasure, we find out why he’s there and how a duck can breathe in space. The cutscenes are voiced by many of the actors from the animated series, and they’re fun the first time you see them, but they trigger every time you replay an area, and it gets old really fast. Thankfully they’re skippable.
Graphically, DuckTales Remastered looks like you’re playing a long-lost episode of the cartoon. The character models all look fantastic and accurate to the show. You’ll notice the environments have all been redone, and while the art itself is good, sometimes the level’s 3D background and foreground don’t seem to match up with the hand-drawn 2D sprite animation. It’s not a deal breaker but it is distracting.
The gameplay is improved over the original with an easier way to do Scrooge’s patented Pogo Jump, there are a few secrets that call back to some things in the original game (which I won’t reveal due to spoilers), and the boss battles have been vastly improved with a lot of expansion and fleshing out. Sometimes that makes them a bit tougher than they were in the original, or should even be in the first place, but it adds to the experience more than it detracts. If you’re playing on the harder difficulty levels, or even at Normal difficulty, you’ll find yourself wishing health refills were as plentiful as they were in the NES version.
Unfortunately, there are some downsides. As I said, the developers ratcheted up the difficulty in some areas, which is fine, but can also be frustrating to first-timers or those who remember the easiness of the original version. Then there are the technical issues. I played both the PS3 and PC versions of the game to compare, and while they both match up equally, each seems to have unique issues. The PS3 version froze on me twice in the same level, in two different spots, forcing me to reset my PS3. It glitched in the introduction level, failing to provide me with a weapon necessary to defeat the first boss, again making a reset mandatory. The PC version will refuse to completely exit, making a trip to the Task Manager necessary, and another member of the TGF staff tells me there are wide reports of audio glitches in the Wii U version. I haven’t heard of any issues with the Xbox 360 version… yet.
These technical shortcomings are troubling, and I hope WayForward and Capcom immediately address them… because they’re pulling down what is, for the most part, a great way to revisit your childhood (or see what the fuss was all about in the first place). Fix them, and this easily becomes a 4-star review.
A PS3 copy of the game was provided for review. Darrin bought a PC copy of the game on Steam for comparison between versions.
