There's simply no denying the fact that Shockman closely resembles the Mega Man games in certain areas. What differentiates Shockman the most is the addition of the horizontal shooting levels embedded throughout the game. Evidently the developers weren't content with having only the platforming levels, so they felt the need to add an interesting twist to the package with these shooter levels. This idea might sound familiar for those of you who've played Bravoman, another action title that included shooting levels, but Shockman is a much better action title and doesn't rely so much on these shooting levels to spice things up. They're more like a part of the game in Shockman, instead of feeling somewhat "tacked on" as they did in Bravoman. You'll understand more thoroughly once you've actually played game.

You don't normally expect a lot of storyline in an action/side-scroller but Shockman actually does a good job of carrying the storyline through in-game cutscenes and dialog. Two years ago Arnold and Sonya were transformed into Shockman and began their fight against evil. One day while walking through the city, they see a news flash about the RYO Empire and their plans to invade Earth. They head to the professor's lab only to find that he has been kidnapped. Unable to return to their human form without the professor's help, they set out to stop the RYO Empire and rescue the professor.

Shockman is pretty standard fare as far as action/side-scrollers go. You can run, jump, and fire your primary weapon, and although you're basically relegated to this one type of firepower, you can hold down the attack button and charge up your weapon in order to unleash the more powerful "Shock Beam." You're going to need it once you start facing off against some of the stronger enemies in the game, specifically the end of level bosses. The control in these platforming levels is pretty tight and responsive, and the ability to charge up your weapon is also a nice plus. The shooting levels are also extremely well done and feature a good amount of challenge in the way you have to deal with not only the various enemies in the stage, but also the challenging level designs.  Thankfully, Shockman gives you an energy bar so you can take quite a few hits before you run out of life instead of a frustrating "one hit and you're dead" type of setup. It's this good balance of difficulty that makes Shockman fun to play.

The visuals in Shockman are actually pretty impressive in most parts of the game. The city levels are easily the most impressive and show a great amount of color and detail, and about the only complaint would be the lack of parallax scrolling. You don't really realize just how important multi-layer scrolling is until you play a game without it and see how much depth is lost. One strong point of Shockman's visuals is the character animation. They're extremely well done, and some of the bosses just look downright fantastic. The lack of variety in the various levels ends up making the levels seem a bit too repetitive and after awhile, you'll get tried of seeing the same themes over and over again.

As much as the visuals resemble the Mega Man games, so too does the music. There are some great tunes in the game, with the underwater levels sporting some of the best Hucard music ever created for a TurboGrafx-16 game. The sound effects in the game tend to blend in too much with the background music, which makes them feel too secondary at times, but it's certainly not something to get all bent out of shape over. This is the type of game that would have been really nice on a CD with some voiced dialog and CD-quality audio. Not that this version isn't good, but you can just see the potential the game has.

It's hard not to like Shockman as it's just a very solid title overall. It's got an interesting plotline going on and some simple, yet very responsive play control to go along with it. Shockman certainly isn't going to win any originality awards, but what it does is take many of the best ideas in action/side-scrollers of this time period, and rolls it all together into one enjoyable package. Sure it's a pretty standard side-scroller, but it also offers enough interesting twists with the shooter levels to make it worth a play through. If you appreciate a good action title that doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, you might want to give this one a try.