Thanks to 8-Bit Legit for the review code

Title: Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 05/19/2023

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Story

When the evil Chester steals a dangerous weapon, it is up to a hero named Timmy to suit up and chase after him, right into his evil fortress! A port of a 2.0 revision of a very famous NES homebrew, Battle Kid does have a light story that pops up now and then, though you can completely skip it by playing in Arcade Mode.

Presentation

Battle Kid is a NES homebrew from the early 2010s, with the particular revision being ported here being from a Famicom release from later in the decade, bringing some quality of life tweaks to the mix. Having gone through a variety of emulation packages and retro reissues on Switch, I was definitely curious to see how 8 Bit Legit would package and bring this gem to the Switch, and unfortunately, my first impressions were really, really poor.

First off, you have a menu that you can bring up by pressing L + R, (which in a cool way, makes this fully compatible with those NES Switch Online controllers, if you have em lying around) and this is where the very, very limited options of the port are presented to you. You can read a cool repro of the manual, and choose between three very basic borders and a blank one. Two of said borders are just a generic TV, with the other one being the game’s key art, and none of them are all that good. The game’s resolution is also locked to one that’s pretty bulky, and doesn’t seem to be close to a 1:1 PAR or pixel perfect display at all, and I was disappointed that no such option was made available. Other than that, you got nothing else in this menu. No controller rebindings, no save/load state options, (though I could see that being a deliberate choice, more on that later) and no neat bonus features or options, leading to a very barren, poor first impression.

In the actual game though, Battle Kid looks great. The cutscenes and the game are clearly reminiscent of Mega Man, and the sectors of the fortress are distinct and cleverly presented, with a variety of funny looking enemies and cool bosses. For an early NES homebrew, it definitely feels like a game that came out right around 1990/1991, which is incredibly impressive, and the soundtrack definitely backs this up with some outstanding and memorable tunes, that seldom get annoying even after throwing yourself at the same boss or tricky room over and over again.

Unfortunately, this port is not a place I’d recommend you appreciate the soundtrack, since Battle Kid’s Switch port has some really messed up audio. Having listened and seen playthroughs of this game before, something just felt off as I made my way through the opening areas of the game, with the soundtrack’s pitch appearing to be a tiny bit off. Then, when I paused the game to check the manual, I realized that opening the emulator’s menu would cause the audio pitch to nudge up, the most notable instance being when you fire Tim’s main weapon.

The game would eventually try to revert to normal, but even this “normal” isn’t quite the same pitch as the original game. Even bringing up the home menu causes this to happen, and I’ve even had moments where playing normally for a few minutes can cause the pitch to nudge a bit here and there. Needless to say, the audio emulation here is completely wrong and is prone to silly pitch changes, and really harms the game’s outstanding sound.

Gameplay

Battle Kid is an action platformer where your main goal is to progress through the fortress and defeat each of the bosses, obtaining keys and powerups to progress deeper within and slowly expand your arsenal. It almost gives off a metroidvania vibe at first due to some areas opening up once you clear bosses and get upgrades, but it mostly feels like a Mega Man game where each stage is merged all onto one map. You have your basic weapon, the ability to jump, and that’s about it until things start to open up, with warp rooms, jump upgrades, and a lot more bonuses to find and help you out, including some extremely useful ones hidden in some of the most devilish rooms in the entire game.

Before starting the game you have several difficulties to choose from, from a Very Easy difficulty that gives you a lot of HP to tank hits from enemies, (it does not protect you from the many, many instant death spikes, however) all the way up to a crazy difficulty level that ends the game the minute you die once. Each difficulty also changes the amount of damage enemies can do to you and their health, with Hard mode being the closest to the game’s original 1.0 difficulty, and the most reasonable of the challenging difficulty levels, since anything higher will cut off the ability to use passwords due to those options dealing with limited lives. Otherwise, you can die as much as you want in the lower difficulties, with the game being very focus on trial and error.

As you navigate the fortress, you’ll often come across handy rooms indicated by a pair of stars on their entrances, and these are the checkpoint rooms; go here, and your HP will be refilled and a password displayed, making a save that you’ll load upon death. Since this port lacks any kind of save state/in-game SRAM feature, this also means copying the passwords and entering them in is mandatory if you want to resume where you left off for later, and the Switch’s capture gallery is incredibly handy in this regard, with the passwords being short enough that they didn’t bother me too much.

I can definitely accept skipping out on Save States for the sake of keeping the game’s original challenge intact, (since save states would utterly remove any challenge from the highest difficulties) but I would have at least liked some sort of option that autofilled the passwords for you to reduce the tedium whenever you close the app and jump back into the game later.

Really the only other aspect of this issue I feel the need to point out, even if incredibly minor, is yes, this game does have input lag. Most emulation releases do and a lot do a good enough job to not make it too noticeable, but Battle Kid is a prime example of a precise reflex platformer, and your jumps and shots need to matter. Generally I found moving and shooting to feel fine enough to get used to, but there were several occasions where I’d press jump on the edge of a block only to slip off to my death, and with some of the crazy platforming you get up to later in the game with very tight movements, I definitely feel that shaving a single frame of input lag in a patch would help significantly. I wouldn’t call it Punch-Out levels of tight, but it definitely feels close, and good luck using this version to beat on the hardest difficulty, especially docked. Most players honestly won’t even notice, but I definitely could sense just a tiny smidge, though thankfully the input lag is nowhere near as noticeable or as bad as the Qubyte collections, and for most people jumping in it’ll just take some adapting.

Luckily, I found the input delay a bit better when playing in handheld mode on my Switch lite, but even still, this doesn’t feel quite as tight as a retro reissue should be, and should be worth keeping in mind. I don’t have any sort of measurement tool in this regard, but with the high intensity of the game, I feel I should at least make my observation known. For all I know, it could be a quirk of the original ROM. Still, with the weird audio quirks, the lack of general polish with the port, and my jumps just not feeling nearly as right as they could be, it was hard to stick with playing in this port for long, as much as the core game captivated me to keep on trying to progress further.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Battle Kid is a brilliantly challenging and fun platformer, with a balance that, despite having crazy difficulty spikes now and then, still manages to be incredibly fun, and the various difficulty options and quality of life added to this later revision really do help to give the game some extra replay value, and incentive to work your way up to beating this on higher and higher difficulties as you practice and get used to how the game’s flow.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about this port, since it is plagued with a lot of annoyances and problems that make this one of the last places I’d advise you play the game. From audio pitch glitches, barebones options, the lack of save states or an autofill password feature, and a tiny smidge of input lag, this is an incredibly barren port, and for the $10 price, double that of an old NES VC title from back in the day, it is honestly pretty upsetting to see such a fantastic game presented in such a barebones fashion.

Even if the omission of a save feature and having to screencap passwords was intentional, just the sheer lack of any sort of display and resolution options, the inaccurate and buggy audio, and really not much else besides the game and some barebones borders really make this port of Battle Kid not the most fun to experience, and the whole time I was having fun with this game, I kept on thinking on how much more enjoyable this port would have been with some extra tweaks and polish.

The input lag here for most people won’t be too tragic, and is really something only a nerd like me would pick up on. Still, it doesn’t make playing on the hardest difficulties the most viable. If you have absolutely no other place to play Battle Kid and do not mind going old school with passwords, then I suppose you’d still get the full experience here, but in a sea of great emulation releases with lots of options, QOL and polish, Battle Kid is unfortunately not one of them, and I truly hope this port gets a patch to bring it up to standards and help showcase this excellent game in a better light.

I give Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril a 5 out of 10.