Talk about old school...
First of all, it's definitely a short title. I blasted through it in about a day and a half just playing it for 5 minutes here and there, but thankfully, I'll definitely be back for more. It has some insanely frustrating bugs (features?) in it that harkens back to the old days of gaming, but it sort of adds to the charm/difficulty of it in some ways.
For one thing, it's uses VERY simple game mechanics. Basically, take Mega Man, remove any ability to gain new weapons, and stir that together with Life-force, and you have AstroBoy DS. You progress through 2d side-scrolling levels kicking the crap out of robots while trying to grab powerups that they drop, until you get to the end and fight a nice big boss character. The powerups work exactly like those old Gradius/Life-force type games where you have a meter that fills up from which you can select to power up your weapons, flight speed, shields, etc. So, it basically degenerates into trying as fast as you can to power up your weapons while recharging your health/shields every so often. It's very simple, but works well and is genuinely fun. These side scrolling levels are then (sort of) changed up every so often with flight levels where you shoot an energy beam rather then punch and kick. These are actually more fun than the ground based ones in my opinion, but mainly just because it moves faster and removes the annoying platforming sections.
The animations are nice, the graphics look great, and apart from the fact that there are very limited enemies, the overall look, style and presentation of the game is all very high quality.
And that brings me to the bad… The platforming in this game is a royal pain in the neck. As I mentioned, it plays similarly to Mega Man in that you have to jump over bottomless pits, ride moving platforms, avoid spikes and energy beams, etc... The problem is that Astrotwerp has feet that are apparently made of ice. He literally slides about 3 inches when he lands, so accurately catching a moving platform means jumping from 3 inches back from where you want to just so you can incorporate the unholy slide. Astroboy can fly to some extent, but that is just as difficult to judge distance with, and I spent more time at the bottom of pits in this game than anywhere else.
Then there are the insanely cheesy bullets that the enemies toss around (in large numbers); they are extremely difficult to avoid even with A-boy's powers, and you are basically forced to try and punch an enemy to death before it can get a shot off if you have any hopes of not getting hit. Not only that, but the bullets don't disappear after hitting you, so you can actually get hit by the same minuscule bullet repeatedly if you're moving. In my experience I ended up just trying to compensate for this by always working towards refilling my health meter. This kind of waters down the game a bit since you're no longer dodging anything and just plowing through, but it was so difficult to avoid them that I really found no other way to succeed.
The other bug that drove me crazy was the hit animation. When you take damage, Astro shows this little pain-cringe sprite animation that takes a half a second or so to finish. If you get hit again during that animation, it starts again...and again…and again. This is maddening enough when its bullets doing it, but on several occasion I fell onto a bed of spikes and sat there watching helpless as a full energy bar slowly drained away while Astroboy twitched in place. Maddening…
With all my complaining out of the way though, it really was a fun game that brought me back to my gaming childhood a bit, and I will totally play it again and again. There's nothing really special about it, but it reminds me of playing NES or Atari, and that's just fine with me. If they had ironed out a few of the bugs and added a little more variety to the attacks, this could have been a great title. As it is, it's just good.