Blaster Master Overdrive is a great game, but it rips the first game off way too much.
Pros:
+ Blaster Master "old-school" -style. Ride a tank in 2D areas, enter caves in a "3D-ish" camera. Awesome.
+ Music. Sounds just great.
+ Challenging. Even after collecting all the gun upgrades, you still have to be on your toes.
+ Saving possibility. The feature the first Blaster Master lacked, therefore was a much harder game than it could be.
+- Satisfying in the end. You've come a long way so the final boss isn't just a regular bad guy, but isn't just enough what you'd expect.
+- Music selection. Although the music in the game is great, it's disappointing that there is really no original music in this game. All the stage and battle themes are from the first Blaster Master, just remixed.
+- Story. This time the story makes sense, but is nothing special to begin with.
Cons:
- Lack of originality. You could almost say that this game is just an upgraded version of the first Blaster Master game for the NES.
- Unbalanced challenge. Far into the game, it was really easy to travel and fight bosses, but somewhere the difficulty just wakes up and instantly you're begging for more health upgrades instead of weapon upgrades.
- Dull world design. At first you're excited about going to caves and different areas, but it gets repetitive very quickly and for the rest of the game you're just searching for the bosses.
In the end, the game was fun but had some problems which made it more frustrating than you think. For a Blaster Master fan, it's still a must-buy.
-Uberpeber