Shatterhand (NES) review "You might suppose that in a game where you’re supposed to wail on everything with powerful fists, your enemies would attack in a manner that encourages brawls. However, your foes often fire potshots at you from a significant distance. You’ll almost never meet an enemy that is an easy target for your fists, so instead you’ll spend a lot of time slowly sneaking forward while leaping or ducking to avoid projectiles. It slows everything to a crawl at the best of times, while in other instances you’re pretty much screwed until you memorize the layout of a level."

Buying games in 2012 isn’t nearly as frightening a prospect as it was a couple of decades ago. We have the Internet, so we can look up a bunch of insightful reviews for any hot new title in a matter of seconds, or we can wait for an online sale and spend half the going rate on a game that excites us. We can download demos and we can even rent games through the mail. As much as we complain, we’re actually quite fortunate.

Shatterhand, an old NES title developed by Natsume (perhaps known best for its work with the Harvest Moon series, though it definitely produced a number of action titles in the early going), released during a time when buying a mediocre or bad game was a huge deal. For most kids—including myself—$50 or $60 was a lot harder to come by in 1990-whatever and it wasn’t unusual to only obtain one or two new games each year (if that). I’m glad that when I saw Shatterhand in the pages of Nintendo Power, I was intrigued but not to the point where I put it anywhere near the top of any wish lists. Winding up with Shatterhand when I was a kid would probably have ruined my year.

That’s not to say that Shatterhand is a bad game. It’s just decidedly underwhelming compared to the other options. Even at the time of its release, it didn’t do anything especially fresh. It also has low replay value and a number of other flaws to boot.

The idea in Shatterhand is that you’re a hero—I think a cop, though the pre-game cutscene doesn’t make much about your background obvious and I don’t have an instruction manual to consult—with a fist that is capable of punching through architecture and robotic enemies alike. So that’s what you’ll do, over the course of seven stages. Then the credits roll and you can enter your initials if you managed to break any high score records (though of course none of that will be saved after you power down your system).

As in Whomp ‘Em, another Jaleco-published NES title that I recently played, you start your journey through Shatterhand by clearing a relatively simple introductory level. Then you can choose the order in which to visit the next few levels before you tackle a final area. However, this isn’t really a Mega Man clone. There’s not a special order that you can follow to make your adventure much easier, since you don’t gain new abilities with each stage cleared. Instead, the ability to select the order in which you visit levels is just a nice way to let you skip to your favorite areas of the game.

I’m not sure that I really even have a favorite area in the game, though, because most of Shatterhand blurs together into a generic depiction of the sort of grim future that serves as the setting for nearly any game of this sort. By NES standards, background art qualifies as “gritty” without appearing too dark, and there’s a lot of detail (concrete and iron and lava are all easily distinguished from one another), but otherwise there’s not much worth noticing. Better than average tunes pipe through your television speakers as you play, but none of the audio selections are going to dethrone something like the soundtracks that drive the Mega Man series; you’re not likely to get any tunes stuck in your head.

Lackluster visuals wouldn’t be an issue if the level design at least gave you a reason to be excited, but that’s actually the area where Shatterhand falls flat. You might suppose that in a game where you’re supposed to wail on everything with powerful fists, your enemies would attack in a manner that encourages brawls. However, your foes often fire potshots at you from a significant distance. You’ll almost never meet an enemy that is an easy target for your fists, so instead you’ll spend a lot of time slowly sneaking forward while leaping or ducking to avoid projectiles. It slows everything to a crawl at the best of times, while in other instances you’re pretty much screwed until you memorize the layout of a level. After the first stage, there aren’t even a lot of ways that you can use your fists to get through a given environment. It’s like someone forgot that this is supposed to be a game about a dude with powerful fists.

I’d almost be willing to believe that several different people designed the stages, though I suspect that’s not actually the case given how small NES development teams usually were. Sometimes, you’ll get to do something kind of cool, like when you scale grating and leap onto ledges to dispatch goons. Or you’ll pass through a pressure chamber and suddenly gravity is reversed and you have to run along the ceiling and duke it out with floating, spike-covered monsters (though that particular instance also has elements that suck, since you have to keep punching and retreating from enemies that are capable of sustaining so much damage before finally dying). Unfortunately, the game’s most impressive moments are joined by less thrilling instances where you find yourself running headlong into bullets fired from an enemy off-screen that you didn’t even know was waiting for you, or meteors suddenly start dropping from the sky and knocking you all around, or a guy flies around using a jetpack and pelts you with missiles while staying outside the range of your fists.

Incidents like I just described occur far too frequently in a game this short. It’s true that many hazards are easily enough avoided once you know they’re coming, but until then you’re stuck in a mire of trial-and-error that seems designed specifically to punish you for playing. So the game is either unfairly cheap and you die more than you should (or advance much more slowly than you might like because you’re trying to be cautious), or it’s relatively easy because you know all of its surprises.

One final thing I should mention is the game’s power-up system, which is wonderful because finally you can attack with something besides your fists (even though barehanded brawling is supposed to provide the game’s core appeal). As you work through the stages, you can break open crates and assemble a helper drone. It will fly behind you, near shoulder level or just above your head, and it will eliminate enemies on your behalf once they come within range. There are several potential drone configurations, depending on what pieces you collect, and your helpers will usually stick around for a decent span of time before deserting you. It’s even possible to bring them with you to boss encounters, if you plan carefully.

So like I said, Shatterhand isn’t a bad game. There are moments that you should genuinely enjoy, which isn’t something I would say about any number of NES duds. That’s not good enough in 2012, though. If I’m being especially honest, it also wasn’t good enough in 1991.

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Staff review by Jason Venter (June 30, 2012) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.