Mega Man 11

I'm a bit torn on MM11. On the one hand, it's a bold new entry that shakes the formula up for the first time since MM7. On the other hand, it's far from the best game in the series due to important MM staples being underwhelming or missing outright. Regarding positives, the game looks pretty good most of the time. I believe this is the first 2.5D numbered entry. There are some cool visual effects from abilities with more depth to the animated backgrounds in levels. Bosses are much more complex even having multiple attack types and forms they take on as the fight goes on. The charged Mega Buster is back with an additional charge for a larger stronger blast and it's awesome. There are some great very challenging levels here as well with Torch Man's stage being my personal favorite. All the new abilities from bosses are awesome and even add additional movement options like the Pile Driver doubling as an air dash. The Double Gear system is cool and fun to use. This is a welcomed new addition. Being able to not only strengthen the classic Mega Buster even further, but also strengthen all other abilities.
The speed gear is where issues come up. It really REALLY mitigates a lot of the challenge of most bosses and platforming sections since you can upgrade it so you move at a normal speed while everyone and everything around you moves slower. This allows you to bombard enemies and bosses with attacks shredding them in seconds before they even have a chance to respond. That's not to say the game is easy. The challenge is fairly close to what you expect from a Mega Man game. Rumor has it, our Normal is their Hard mode just renamed. Not sure if that's true. My issue with the difficulty is that without using Double Gear, the game can stomp you hard. With Double Gear, the shop, and upgrade system it's one of the easiest games in the series.
Some stages absolutely stink with Bounce Man's being one of the worst in the series. It's incredibly annoying being bounced around constantly, but the general look of the level is just uninspired. What is the theme here? At one point it looked like I was in an indoor bouldering room. What does that have to do with bouncing? The boss was absurdly easy too. The Wily Stages were fairly tough, but the bosses left a lot to be desired. There's just nothing new here. Yellow Devil from MM1 returns. Then there's a boss gauntlet of all of the same bosses you just fought to get here. Then finally you fight the Wily Machine 11 which looks nearly identical to the Wily Capsule from previous games. There's no surprises here. I think they played it a little too safe with the final fortress.
The biggest issue by far is with the soundtrack. It's not that the compositions are bad. They just sound too soft and don't fit Megaman's usual style of rock and metal. It's a problem. It all just blends into the background. The mix sucks too. The music doesn't cut through enough to stand out even with turning down the two other volumes to hear it better. It's just not Rock Man. It reminds me of the awful PS1 version of MMX3's badass soundtrack. The voices and sound effects are too loud by comparison. At least the voice acting is adequate which is an achievement after the infamous "acting" featured in MM8.
It's nice to have new Mega Man and I hope we get more, but I really want to see something different in regards to bosses and levels with the return of the classic characters. Where is Proto Man? Where is Bass? There are no unlockable characters to play as like in MM10. More creative bosses than the typical lineup of fire-type, bomb-type, electricity-type and ice-type. And maybe it's time to move on from Wily. We've been fighting him for 11 games now and that's not including spin-offs. I like the new additions and I would recommend this to fans of the series. (6/10)

Honestly, it's ok. They really go hard on the gimmick of the "gears". Everyone says gear every other sentence, the Wily Stages are mostly gears. All of the robot masters utilize one of the Speed or Power Gear powers. Also, for some reason they call Mega Man "Mega" in this game. Before you say it, I know he's called Rock Man and his "civilian" name is Rock. I'd argue just calling him Rock in America as well. That's just my opinion. Still, it was kind of jarring.

One last complaint that is less of a nitpick, the soundtrack. Don't get me wrong, the compositions themselves are decent however the INSTRUMENTS used are lousy. It feels so lifeless for such a vibrant game. That's why the fan remixes sound so awesome, they don't really remix it, they just use the 16-bit X style instruments or the 8-bit instruments or even the Mega Man 7 instruments. Speaking of 8-bit, why is there no 8-bit option for the soundtrack? They put in an option for this slow-paced Jazzy rendition of the soundtrack as free DLC, but not an 8-bit version? Huge missed opportunity.

Everything else is solid. The controls are tight. The upgrades you can purchase in Auto's shop are extremely useful and you can turn them on or off at your discretion. Yes, that means you can have all the upgrades on at once if you want to. Or you can try to beat it without any upgrades, which is an achievement. The double gear system is fun and there's a risk reward to it with the full power DOUBLE since you need to be at low health to use it. The level design is classic, well thought out, and fair for the most part. You don't NEED the DG system to beat the game, and I think there's an achievement for that too. However, there are some sections that are a bit too tight in terms of timing if you decide not to use the Speed or Power gear.

Like I said, it's ok. I lean positive on this one. However, it's already been a number of years and nothing else from the Mega Man front that isn't some weird mobile game. I'm saddened by that. I recommend grabbing this one on sale.

I have never been great at Mega Man games but the option to play the game on an easier mode really helps. Most things feel like reasonable challenges. If you know what you're doing this game is rather short, but the weapons and mix-and-match powerups from the shop do provide the game some replayability, especially if you want to try out the harder difficulty modes. I'm under no illusion that I'll ever be able to get all the achievements for this game, but I've had fun going after them and have managed to get the majority despite being bad, which tells me that most of the achievements were designed with the capabilities of an average player in mind.

One complaint is that if you've never played a Mega Man classic game before, I can see the moveset being unintuitive. Especially if you're coming here from the X series. They explain the new stuff (the gears) but not the old stuff (Rush coil and slide) which felt like an oversight given the rest of the game's presentation. When you get a boss weapon, you have a whole little (optional) tutorial letting you play around with it to learn it, and there's also one for the Rush jet you unlock partway through the game, so why they didn't so much as mention your initial movement options is beyond me. While you don't really need Rush coil, I can see new players getting frustrated or bricked in several places because they don't realize that the slide is a button COMBO and not a dedicated button like literally everything else. Pre-existing Mega Man fans will know this, but new players may be confused as to why a slide option exists in the button binding menu but isn't seemingly bound to anything.

That being said, this is also definitely the game with the most newbie-friendly features built in. Most of the Legacy collections have optional newbie modes, but the options available here feel more sophisticated and nuanced for various levels of play, versus the Legacy Collection's "either the game holds your hand or it won't" methodology.

Overall I had fun and will probably play through this one again every once in a while, just because it's very easy to pick up and play a stage or two. If you ever wanted to try a classic-style Mega Man game, this is probably the best place to start.

a very good game. the gear system is fun to use, the weapon roster is fantastic, the stage design is pretty good overall, a really fun time. strongly recommend it. easily in my top 3 favorite classic megaman game

(un?)fortunately the easiest castle in the series which i dont mind this game is still excellent

Good game! Beat it in about 4.5 hours one day. (Played on casual because Mega Man games are usually very difficult.) It was really fun! The bosses were cool, as were the levels. It did a really great job iterating creatively on the formula while still feeling like classic Mega Man.

A return to form
I was dissappointed that Megaman 9 and Megaman 10 went back to 8 bit graphics and simple playstyles. Don't get me wrong: those two are still great megaman games, great action platformers even. But My favorites were Megaman 7 and Megaman 8, I wasn't that attached to the 8 bit era of the blue bomber
Then Megaman 11 came around, and it built upon the previous games, adding the double gear system and... a surprisingly high difficulty for a modern game. It pretty much felt old school fashioned. Even I with a lot of experience in the genre was struggling to win my first robot master battle.
Megaman 11 is a great game, great use of the source material fleshing out a bit more of the story but still focusing on what matters most: great gameplay, music, visuals (this is how you do 2.5D) and a game that reminded me of why I love Megaman so much.

game's hard as shit, but the weapons are reaaaal nifty
At it's core it's not really different than any other Megaman game, but it's got a lot of nice bells and whistles that makes it frankly just more enjoyable to play than previous entries.