Who would have thought that in 1993 when the Power Rangers first saw the light of day, that in 2014 it would have gone through many iterations and still be going strong. It was always a large merchandising project, so it’s no surprise that the new form of the show should get its own handheld game in the form of Saban's Power Rangers: Super Megaforce for the Nintendo 3DS.

Being a tie in game, expectations were not high; very few of these games are either trend setters or great examples of their specific game genre. Power Rangers provides you with side scrolling action, which is often reduced to run and shoot. There are coins to collect along the way, but I’m not sure I understood why, as there didn’t seem to be anything to spend them on.

Opening up the game brings forth the options menu. Here you can chose to play the game in story mode, although I feel this stretches the concept of what a story should be as the game has little plot. You can open the Museum, within which you can review information about each of the Power Ranger teams, but the catch is, you have to unlock them first, otherwise the screen contains no information. You can also scan in your Ranger keys for further rewards. I don’t have any of those so am not able to say how well this works. Here you can also completely reset the game back to its original, virgin, version.

You can play with a number of differing strategies. Close Range keeps your rangers in close proximity to each other. Long range often replaces Katanas with guns, Balanced feel awfully like Close Range and Defence allows your companion to raise a shield which mostly protects themselves, not a great use to you, unless you have to switch characters.

Combat can often be frustrating. During the transition of each level, the game will throw various goons at you, but everyone appears to be on invisible train tracks, great if you can position yourself, but if you’re not on the same line as your attacker you will miss. Your character also freezes in place when you’re firing your gun creating a locked in period where you can’t move out of the way, not to worry as often your AI companion may just step in killing the goons and removing any reason for you to engage.

The top game screen show you your progress, which is controlled via the directional button, this works pretty well, with the main battle restriction already mentioned. The cross control is used to heal either of your characters; you can use the bottom screen to change your battle tactics.

With each level you complete, your Ranger increases in level, but this increase doesn’t seem to make a great deal of difference to the combat. If you make it through each of the episodic chapters, you get presented with a boss fight as the Rangers combine their power to create a giant robot. To beef out the main game there are mini quests to undertake.

It’s not a great game, the enemies mostly just rush you with no attempt to avoid your killer gun or sword, this repetition gets a bit wearing after a while. Graphically the game does not challenge or stretch the 3DS capabilities and I ended up turning the audio off after about five minutes.

Its overall lack of challenge and its shortcomings mean that this game is only going to appeal to less discerning kids who are crazy about Power Rangers.

4

Charles Packer