I have a love-hate relationship with Mega Man. I love the character design, the robots, the bright colours, the whole idea of beating a Robot Master and stealing its weapon, and every few years I convince myself I'm finally going to get properly into the series, only to hit some ridiculous difficulty spike, get stuck, get annoyed and wander off to play something else.
That's why I was surprised by how much I played of Mega Man: Dual Override. It has the same pace and challenge of the best retro games; I still hit that familiar wall, but it came later than usual, and I found myself wanting to have another go rather than simply deciding I'd had enough.
Playing on PS5 Pro, Dual Override looks lovely, with fluid, bouncy animation, bold environments and plenty of modern polish, but Capcom hasn't tried to turn Mega Man into something he isn't. The visuals are cleaner and more sophisticated, obviously, but the series' personality is still all over it, from the cartoon character designs to the ridiculously aggressive and flamboyant Robot Masters and the bright, chunky mechanical world they inhabit.
Mega Man goes back to basics
After my hands-on, I went back to Mega Man: The Wily Wars on Nintendo Switch 2, free on Nintendo Online, and played the original NES games again, which made me appreciate how closely Dual Override sticks to the core design. The levels still feel like collections of little platforming problems, with each screen asking you to work out how you're going to climb, jump, slide and shoot your way through it without getting knocked off a platform or smashed by one of the roaming robots.
That familiar Mega Man tension is there too: you know exactly what you should do, but getting your hands to do it without taking a hit is another matter. Dual Override sits right on that edge for much of the demo, challenging enough to make getting through a section feel like an achievement without immediately making me want to throw the controller across the room (which would have been embarrassing given I was sat in Capcom’s London studio).
The Robot Masters are where things get considerably tougher. The demo gives me three bosses to tackle one after the other, and as with the classic games, they're essentially puzzles disguised as fights. You need to watch what they're doing, learn their movements and attacks, figure out the patterns and rhythms, work out where the safe spaces are and then slowly turn that knowledge into something you can actually execute.
Big Press Don is the most straightforward of the three, a rocket-springed trashcan-like character with a mohawk who spends his fight bouncing around the arena. At first he's all movement and noise, but once I realise Mega Man can slide underneath him when he hops across the screen, the whole thing becomes much easier.
Astro Man is a different story. Fans will recognise him from Mega Man 8, and he's back flying around the arena inside an orb, firing smaller globe patterns at my on-screen Blue Bomber before dropping screen-filling meteors from above. His attacks aren't especially difficult to understand once you've watched them a few times, but trying to remember those patterns while also dealing with everything else happening around you is where the trouble starts.
Battling the new Twinkle Girl
Then Twinkle Girl turns up, and this is where Dual Override sheds any desire to be ‘easy’ and offers up a classic Mega Man difficulty spike. She's one of eight new Robot Masters in the new game and has a suitably chaotic fireworks theme, filling the arena with explosion patterns while mixing in slide attacks and other movements. I spent a fair amount of time simply trying to understand her rhythm before I could concentrate on actually damaging her.
Fed up with losing, retrying, losing again (and again), switching to Proto Man makes the fight a little easier. He's returning as a playable character alongside Mega Man and has his own abilities, including the ability to speed across the screen incredibly quickly, almost like an arrow. That makes it much easier to get out of the way of some of Twinkle Girl's attacks and close the distance when there's an opening. The problem is that Twinkle Girl doesn't just keep doing the same thing. She starts adapting to my approach and countering what I'm doing, so a tactic that works one, two or three times might not work quite so well the fourth. It adds another layer to the usual Mega Man boss routine, where learning the pattern is only half the job and you then have to work out how to use that knowledge when the boss starts changing things up.
There's more flexibility elsewhere too. The game introduces a new Override system that temporarily lets Mega Man and Proto Man push beyond his normal capabilities, but the boost comes with a downside: once it runs out, you suffer a temporary drop in performance. It's something you'll need to decide when to use rather than simply treating it as a button you hit whenever a boss gets difficult.
Custom Chips give you another way to tailor Mega Man and Proto Man, with upgrades including rapid-fire, a protective shield bubble, hover and other abilities – essentially giving you ways to play aggressively and defensively. I didn't get enough time with the system to know how much it will change the finished game, but it's an interesting addition to a series that's traditionally been very focused on learning its levels and bosses rather than building a character. The weapons still have that familiar trade-off too, because special attacks consume energy and you'll need to think about when they're worth using. One of the new weapons in the demo, for example, combines a powerful charge attack with an aerial dash, giving it a use beyond simply hitting an enemy harder.
Don't mess with what works
That's a lot of new stuff around a formula that, for the most part, Capcom clearly doesn't want to mess with, and after playing the demo I think that's probably the right decision. Going back to the NES games afterwards made it obvious how much of Dual Override's appeal comes from keeping those old ideas intact rather than reinventing them.
I'm still not brilliant at Mega Man, and I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities ahead for Dual Override to remind me exactly why I keep falling out with these games, but this is the first time in a while I've come away from a Mega Man hands-on thinking about how much further I might get rather than how quickly I can put the controller down.
Mega Man: Dual Override is coming in 2027 for Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC.
