Retro gamers are spoiled these days. Virtually every major title that was popular in the 80s or 90s has been reissued or remade, sometimes even for multiple platforms, and a fair amount of those have even seen sequels. The release of
Blaster Master Zero in 2017 was welcome, but it wasn't exactly a surprise to see it. However, it wasn't always so. Things like
Metroid cropping up as a bonus in
Metroid Prime were rare, and they were almost a selling point in their own right, just because of how starved of retro experiences we were. That all changed, though, when Nintendo began releasing a trove of retro titles on their "Virtual Console" service for the Wii, and that paved the way for eShop titles like
Blaster Master Overdrive.
On its release and even now at a glance,
Overdrive felt like the proper 16-bit follow-up that
Blaster Master 2 so miserably failed to be. Although it uses polygons, it wasn't too hard to imagine the SNES producing something similar. The backgrounds here have more of an organic feel as opposed to the original's mixture of natural and man-made structures, but otherwise, it visually looks very much in the same spirit but upgraded to 2009 standards. Likewise, with its appropriation of the original game's soundtracks, it almost serves as sort of a soft remake of that original title. Ultimately,
Zero ended up being more of a faithful remake in terms of its level design, but Sunsoft showed a slavish devotion to recreating the feel of the NES classic that was arguably missing from that later title. With so many years passing between the original release and
Overdrive, it's unclear how much, if any, of the original team was onboard for this game, but there's an almost reverent attention to keeping the game similar to the original. You could almost argue that the game offers nothing new, but for fans of the original that may be a good thing, and it does offer a few tweaks here and there to how it plays.
For the uninitiated,
Blaster Master and
Blaster Master Overdrive, in turn, are action adventure games in the vein of
Metroid with a few small tweaks to the usual formula. Instead of simply exploring the world on foot, the player commands a tank that handles the majority of the platforming and exploration. Although the player is much weaker on foot, it is possible and necessary to leave the tank to explore various caves that serve as the game's underworld. Once a cave has been entered, the perspective switches to an overhead angle with gameplay feeling a bit more like
The Legend of Zelda. Some caves only contain weapon power-ups, while others also contain a boss that must be defeated. While the overhead sections were rather labyrinthine in the original game,
Overdrive's caves are more straightforward, and simplifying them may have actually been a good choice. To keep things interesting, Sunsoft upped the ante on the combat in these sections, and there's an almost bullet-heel influence here, particularly in the boss sections. While this does represent a departure from the original, it's welcome, and the challenges here can be quite satisfying. Upon defeating a boss, the player will collect an upgrade to their tank that allows for further exploration of the overworld. All of this could seem redundant and expected to fans of the original, but this just highlights how remarkably faithful
Overdrive is to the formula of the classic game. Many of the power-ups are new to
Overdrive such as the grappling hook and drill, but others, such as the hover jets return from the original. Otherwise, it does make a handful of quality of life upgrades, including the addition of a map, as well as on-the-fly weapon changes, and the addition of save points is truly invaluable, especially considering how difficult certain sections and the boss encounters can be. In short, if you loved the original
Blaster Master, but wanted to play a remixed version with different stages and some slight upgrades,
Overdrive may serve nicely.
Although, I wish I could leave it at that, despite the obvious passion that the developers had for this project,
Overdrive does have some weaknesses, unfortunately, with certain aspects of the game feeling unpolished. The only supported controller for this game is the Wiimote held sideways. At the time, this seemed sensible, and I recall playing quite a few NES virtual console titles in this manner without major complaints. If Sunsoft had restricted gameplay to 4 buttons as on the NES version, this could have worked, and things feel solid enough when in the vehicle but become rather more clumsy in the overhead sections. There, Sunsoft makes full use of the Wiimote with weapon selection being assigned to A, and strafing being assigned to B. While this is manageable, the game would have played so much better with the classic controller. Despite publisher Gaijinworks stating that they would look into adding classic controller support, a patch never materialized. Even the ability to remap controls could have alleviated some of the awkwardness, but alas, it wasn't meant to be. The game also does not seem to work well with 3rd party controllers, such as the ones by 8bitdo, leaving no great control options for playing on the original hardware.
The other issue with
Overdrive is its difficulty curve. As mentioned the game draws significant influence from shoot 'em ups, and it is arguably a more difficult game than the original. I don't begrudge it for raising the difficulty level, but the means by which it does so don't always feel fair. Surprisingly, this is more of an issue in the tank sections than when on foot. While the world design is generally quite strong, the game frequently places enemies next to ledges in claustrophobic surroundings that don't allow the player to jump over or attack said enemies. When the player is not near the baddies, they will happily move farther away, but as you approach, they will quickly move to defend their territory, and I frequently found that there was no strategy to pass them but to intentionally take damage and hope that I could recover with health pickups further down the road. Powering up the tank somewhat mitigates this issue, but the difficulty progression almost feels backwards in this regard. It's clear that more playtesting would have benefited the game. The original game did have some similar issues but only towards the end of the game, and here, the entire game could have used some tuning up.
Although it does have several major flaws, and
Blaster Master Zero has undoubtedly supplanted it as the go-to reboot of the series,
Overdrive was a good effort by Sunsoft to keep the franchise alive, and it was probably the best sequel released up to that point. Even now, it's different enough from
Zero to still be worth playing, and if it were to get the remaster treatment, it could easily be made into an even better game just by tweaking the enemy AI and control scheme. Although it doesn't completely live up to its namesake, it's a great game in its own right and certainly one of the best Wiiware games.. With the Wii Shop Channel now being closed, it's unlikely that the game will reach many new players at present, but it may be worth emulating, and Sunsoft would do well to reissue this at some point.