by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Tanzer
• Publisher: Mega Cat Studios
• Developer: Mikael Tillander
• Genesis/ Mega Drive

A brand new Mega Drive title, Tanzer rocks an Amiga style aesthetic, calling back to games like Shadow of the Beast with its tracker style soundtrack and detailed landscapes. If I’m honest, that had me skeptical, as too often games from the Amiga school of design are easier to appreciate for their mood and artistry than for the experience of playing them. Publisher and developer Mega Cat Studios has also put out several titles for retro hardware before, which I often found similarly easier to appreciate as aesthetic exercises. But when they reached out with a chance to review Tanzer, I couldn’t pass up the chance to see what it’s like to play a new Mega Drive cartridge in 2019.

Luckily, Tanzer is more than a simple aesthetic exercise. Creator Mikael Tillander has imbued Tanzer with action that takes after Strider, with a big fuck off blade and cartwheeling flips for every jump. You can’t attack while moving, which initially felt restrictive until I understood that Tanzer wants you to spend most of your time airborne.

Air movement is graceful, with a second jump that doubles as an attack, and is refreshed each time you strike an enemy. With good timing I was able to chain attacks off of them and quickly cross the landscape. This keeps combat fluid and gives it momentum that made each session faster as I continued to familiarize myself with enemy patterns. It gives Tanzer’s play a powerful energy that complements the frenetic mood it sets with its visuals and soundtrack.

The game sends you through time to destroy a mutant virus, giving it a great variety of areas, rendered in a broad palette of colors and enemies. The nightmare biology of enemies contrasts well with the architecture of the various time periods. Most of them have simple patterns, which make them easy to dodge, but are still dangerous given that Tanzer can only take three hits. Play smart and aggressive, however, and most of them will barely get a chance to attack, especially once you gain some abilities that let you outright negate their attacks. Between the fast strikes, flashy air attacks and elemental abilities there’s an expressive range of movement available. 

That’s why Tanzer’s upgrade system feels like its biggest misstep. Enemies drop gold upon death, which can be used at the end of an act to purchase new special attacks, health and–strangely enough–saves. Especially when I started out, this meant that it was much smarter to move slowly and ensure I killed every enemy to make sure I had the tools I needed to play around, or just survive. It actively incentivized me to avoid staying airborne and clearing stages faster.

Aside from score, there aren’t a lot of formal rewards for engaging in Tanzer’s air chains. It makes approaching Tanzer’s levels messy. Using air movement to clear levels fast feels great, but leaves you with less currency to afford the more expressive moveset.  Learning enemy patterns to clear them all out is the obvious solution, but it slows down the pace and disincentivizes using one of Tanzer’s most fun tools. There are challenge areas that encourage you to time Tanzer’s air attacks to stay airborne between checkpoints, but these only give a score bonus, and have you intentionally avoid enemies that you’d otherwise gain more gold from.

To be clear–there’s still fun in running through Tanzer’s stages trying to see how long you can stay airborne. And as I learned the stages it became easier to strike that balance between speed and efficient enemy destruction, with its elemental powers going a long way to give combat other forms of expression.  But it misses its chance to tie the intrinsic reward of movement with a formal one, which would open up expressive play more as you engage with its movement.

You either play methodical to get access to a more expressive moveset, or you limit yourself to your basic moves trying to shoot for a high score. Ideally, the two should complement each other and open up the game as you master its tools, but instead the two approaches act like different sets of challenges. Which isn’t invalid, but does feel unnecessarily limiting.

Along those lines, the checkpoint system is similarly limiting. Tanzer only has one life–three hits and you start all the way from the beginning. There are no continues, unless you save enough gold to buy one from the shop. Again, this requires methodical play, but also limits your options for expression, since you’ll have to play several stages without any abilities to earn enough currency to buy one. You’ll be able to continue indefinitely from that point once you’ve purchased the continue, but it will be erased if you reset or turn off the console.

It’s an unwelcome return of Mega Drive era sensibilities, and manages to be even harsher than most games of the era, since they often gave you multiple lives and continues from the start, or at the least restored health between stages. No such luck here. Tanzer’s speed keeps it from being as egregious as it could be, since the early stages can be completed in just a few minutes, but as I grinded through them for the hundredth time I found myself wishing for at least a level select. Maybe this is what someone wants out a new Mega Drive game, but when SEGA’s own re-releases are offering these time saving options, it’s a decision that feels archaic.

I loved my time with Tanzer, at least moment to moment. Tanzer’s powerful vibes and art direction creates a club like atmosphere that makes it easy to fall into a trance, complementing the endless forward momentum you can achieve with good play. The tension between Tanzer’s extreme vulnerability and the ability to destroy a boss in seconds suits her knife edge, ninja-like movement. But where modern action titles have found ways to prevent even death from stopping their momentum, Tanzer continues to pump the brakes abruptly at its peaks, grinding itself to a halt. If not for its stubborn adherence to tedious old-school design continue systems, Tanzer could easily be a successful bridge between the best of the modern and past eras.

In Tanzer’s intro she mourns “All I wanted to do was dance.” It’s a tragedy then, that her graceful moves are tripped up by these missteps.