Taking care of kids is not easy. They get into everything, think they know far more than they actually do, and the weird little beasties are hyperactive plague vectors. Somehow, despite all this, they're really awesome overall, but even so it takes the patience of a saint to make caring for them one's life's work. This makes it even more impressive that Anastasia, former hench for the capitalist villain Maximillian Tychoon, runs her city's orphanage. It also makes her vulnerable to pressure when Tychoon wants something from her, and now he's kidnapped all Anastasia's orphans to force her to help him become mayor.
What Maximillian hasn't taken into account is that Anastasia is far more dedicated to her orphans than she ever was to being second banana to a self-important industrialist. Breaking her old equipment out of storage, Anastasia flies off to retrieve her kids and bring them home from a working environment that's a few safety regulations shy of OSHA approval. Saving the world, protecting the city from a corrupt mayor, or even fighting generic evil are more side effects than a goal, but as it turns out Anastasia would have made an excellent superhero if she didn't have other responsibilities to live up to.
While Anastasia doesn't seem to have a hero/villain/hench name, her game is Knuckle Jet, which would have been a fitting identity if she'd ever been referred to by it anywhere. Knuckle Jet is a 2D perspective side-view action platformer, although seeing as Anastasia is blasting through the air most of the time "platformer" is more a general category than actual description. The main power in Knuckle Jet is the giant rocket fist Anastasia wields, capable of countering any attack, beating down enemies, and letting her briefly fly. Every level is designed to work those abilities to the fullest, with zero dead space as one challenge gives way to the next with no repetition.
Starting off with no equipment but her rusty rocket fist and finding her old worn-out hench costume in the first level, Anastasia is still fairly powerful and only gets stronger as better equipment becomes available. Run and jump come standard, of course, but her rocket fist lets her punch anything plus gives a nice air boost, meaning she can stay aloft forever by chaining punches right from the start. It's not as fast as the rocket burst, which overheats relatively quickly while letting you fly in a straight line in one of the standard eight directions, but it's always good to have the option to keep off the ground when it's made of spinning gears, blades, spikes or other painful flooring options. Busting up enemy robots also fills a purple meter that allows free-form flight, busting straight through enemies rather than destroying but also bouncing off like the standard rocket burst.
While the moveset is small the levels are perfectly tuned to make full use of them, featuring a succession of rooms and corridors changing from enemy encounters to precision flying challenges. Enemies are various types of drones and gun turrets, but certain bots are made of components tacked together any which way to create a custom encounter. These are all vulnerable to a head-punch, but dodging bullets and saw blades can make getting at the weak spot tricky. All bullets, though, can be punched back to where they came from, and while a reflected bullet may only take down the gun that shot it, it's still an opening to exploit. It also helps that enemies are as susceptible to environmental hazards as Anastasia is, so knocking a few propellers off a bot and letting it fall into a grinder is every bit as effective as pinpoint-targeting its head.
The main power in Knuckle Jet is the giant rocket fist Anastasia wields, capable of countering any attack, beating down enemies, and letting her briefly fly. Every level is designed to work those abilities to the fullest, with zero dead space as one challenge gives way to the next with no repetition.
The level layout is equally inventive, with hidden and bonus areas scattered just about everywhere. Each level has a checklist of goodies to pick up, from golden bolts to soundtrack tunes, special blue medallions that open up a world's bonus levels when they're all collected, and scrapbook development art that's just fun to look at. Granted, you might have to fly through some incredibly tricky gauntlets to pick them up, but level checkpoints are reasonably spaced and there's infinite lives, so no reason not to keep trying other than the occasional urge to crack the gamepad in half.
As the levels progress and more secrets are turned up, Anastasia earns new equipment that can completely change how she approaches a level. The sawblade fist, for example, was a go-to for me for most of the game, thanks to it firing out a blade for an extra ranged attack. The Missile Mitten, on the other hand, completely replaces the punch with a homing missile, which is useful in some levels and not so much when you need to punch away incoming bullets. Different helmets and armor provide other effects, and all of them can be upgraded from the starting level to three-star quality, enhancing the amount of health, rocket dash and free-flying nitro. Granted, it's expensive, but the bolts collected in each level add up quickly and there's even time trial challenges that pay off nicely with multiple tiers of reward for fast level completion.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://hardcoregamer.com/review-knuckle-jet/
