Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road on the NES is the top-down run and gun shooter sequel to the arcade hit, Ikari Warriors. Like the first game in the series, Victory Road is ported to the NES by Micronics. To their credit this game game fixes some of the issues of the NES version of Ikari, the absurd game length is made much more reasonable, there is a better adaptation the arcade rotary joystick control for the NES where you can lock your firing direction while moving, the graphics and music are also improvements. There are also other improvements on this port from the arcade like the ability to keep different weapons and select them on your pause screen or collect hearts and use them in shops for items. This game also keeps the main drawing point, which is co-op play.
However, those improvements are pretty minor and the core gameplay flaws of high difficulty and poor, sluggish controls remain. On top of those core flaws, there are some new additional things to gripe about. One big item is that you only get one life. While you still could cheat code (A, B, B, A to revive) your way to the final boss, if you play the game straight up, you'll find yourself at the Game Over screen anytime you die. And since this game has a difficulty cranked to 10, expect to die A LOT. Another de-volvement in the game is that they gave up on having it make any sort of sense. At least in Ikari it was pretty clear that the game was a Commando rip-off and featured you playing a Rambo-like character. Now, it gets weird shotting up alien creatures that don't make any kind of sense for no apparently good reason. If they were going to make such a departure from the original game, they should have just went with a new IP. Finally, while I could give the original a little credit for being an earlier co-op, I can't extend this one the same leeway given they didn't really fix critical problems. Avoid this one at all costs.