Shantae: Risky’s Revenge

After a bright opening, niggles soon start to pile up. The in-game map is worse than useless, covering exterior areas while stubbornly refusing to detail the more intricate dungeons. Sporadically, you'll be tested by tricky platforming challenges, with one mistimed jump sending you all the way back to the start of the area rather than the platform you last landed on safely. The later stages introduce new enemies seemingly intended to infuriate rather than challenge. And occasionally the design is almost wilfully obtuse, leaving you slowly combing every screen until you figure out exactly where you're supposed to be, or who you need to speak to.

One layered area – where Shantae can leap into or out of the screen onto a new plane – seems to deliberately misdirect the player, ensuring most will miss the one place they need to go to progress the story. Whether you'll make the necessary discovery through happy accident or process of elimination, one thing is clear: this is not good design.

That said, Shantae herself is a delight to control, animating beautifully as she leaps and whips her way through Sequin Town. Often it resembles the best 16-bit game you never played, with silky smooth parallax scrolling, detailed characters and backdrops, and a couple of terrific boss battles that throw huge sprites around the screen with gay abandon but no hint of slowdown.

Curiously, it's a game you imagine would have looked at home on the Amiga rather than a console, but perhaps that's just personal nostalgia talking. And though I had a whinge about it before, the layered background effect on some screens is another delightful visual flourish.

An exceptionally pretty game this may be, but strip away the sumptuous graphics and you're left with a standard platform adventure that doesn't always compare too favourably with its influences. There's little of the depth of the best Castlevanias, and certainly none of the considered intricacy of the Metroid games. The fact that most of the secrets are a means to an end rather than the end itself makes them less attractive to seek out. Sure, finding them might mean you eventually have more offensive options available, but in the end you're still hunting for jam jars.

The Metacritic tally for Risky's Revenge – it was last year's highest-scoring DS game upon its US release – suggests its calculatedly old-school approach will find favour with some players. But for my money, it's a reminder of how far gaming has come since the 16-bit era.

There are lessons to be learned from the elegant simplicity of the best retro titles, though the likes of Super Meat Boy and Pac-Man Championship DX prove you can make concessions to modern gamers without compromising your traditionalist ideals. WayForward would do well to realise that its name needn't be a misnomer – occasionally, Risky's Revenge proves you can look to the past with one eye on the present. If only its creators had done so more often.