How old is Sonic the Hedgehog?

Bat Boy is a spectacular, Super Sentai-style, Shovel Knight spiritual successor that stands supreme. Now that I’ve got that alliteration out of my system, I can use other glowing words to describe this home-run of a game. Bat Boy is a retro-inspired action platformer that serves as a send-up to some of the great titans in the history of the genre. Right off the bat, Bat Boy will feel familiar if you have played classic games like Mega Man, Ducktales or Ninja Gaiden. Similar to other retro-inspired modern classics, Shovel Knight and The Messenger, this game soars and lands among some of my very favorites.

The sports themed crime fighters confront Lord Vicious and his ally Azaros.

Bat Boy tells the somewhat simplistic, yet fresh, story of Ryosuke, a high school baseball player, who along with his group of star-athlete friends, lives an idyllic life that revolves around playing sports all day and hanging out, until night falls upon their town, and they suit up in superhero costumes themed around the various sports that each of them play, and fight crime as a team. It feels like a playable Saturday morning cartoon in many ways. His friends play a wide variety of sports: American football, tennis, basketball, kendo and just about anything else you could imagine a high school having access to, so the superhero costumes are diverse, distinct and bold, making each character stand out from the other. One night, the villainous Lord Vicious suddenly appears from another dimension, the dangerous world known as Stratoss, and lures the friends out. One by one, they are afflicted by a brainwashing curse, that our hero Bat Boy deftly avoids. Lord Vicious and his mysterious right-hand man, another baseball bat wielding rogue named Azaros, lead the former sports-star vigilante crime fighters through a portal and Bat Boy, wanting to save his friends, is compelled to follow. When Ryosuke appears in Stratoss, he finds and joins forces with Garou, a talking crow companion, and they set off together to rescue Bat Boy’s friends and vanquish Lord Vicious.

Bat Boy utilizes baseball-themed abilities, as well as that of his friends’ various sports. It never gets old returning a projectile to its sender and then cracking a Pig with your bat and sending them rolling away.

 As I stated earlier, Bat Boy echoes NES era classics like Mega Man and Ninja Gaiden. There is a world map for selecting your stage that immediately makes one think of Super Mario Bros 3. The map lets you choose which stage to visit, as there isn’t a set order for many of them, and there is also a hideout that Ryosuke can visit between levels and listen to music and visit with the friends that he has managed to save thus far. A retro-inspired 8-bit game like Bat Boy really could not seek influence from a more respected cadre of video game forefathers. I do not mention these landmark games to say that Bat Boy apes their innovations, rather to give this game its laurels for choosing a veritable Mt. Rushmore of video game greats to pay homage to.

Ryosuke begins his adventure with his trusty aluminum bat, which grants him his most basic of abilities, like firing projectiles back at enemies. There are several diverse stages through which the player has to navigate increasingly difficult platforming puzzles and thwart progressively more clever enemy types. Bat Boy will venture forth through grasslands, crystalline caves, frozen mountaintops, a haunted mansion, a malfunctioning factory, a lava-filled mine and more. The aesthetics of the stages are themed around whichever of Bat Boy’s former companions serves as the boss of the level, e.g., the mine level features Mr. Blitzer, Ryosuke’s football playing friend, as the boss, and many of the enemies in the stage are themed around football. This creates an experience where no stage looks, feels or plays like the one that came before it, and serves the game to keep its refreshingly digestible runtime feeling new and novel the whole way through.

An example of one of the moves that Bat Boy learns, a charging swoop move, that both deals strong damage and serves Ryosuke to clear large gaps that might otherwise be difficult to navigate.

To once again invoke Mega Man, one of the major features of Bat Boy is that he picks up new skills from his friends after bashing their heads in and clearing up their brainwashing. He learns several fun new abilities, such as hurling his bat and using it to jump off and reach greater heights, or using a ribbon to catch grappling points. It is a blast to unlock Bat Boy’s full arsenal of moves and revisit a stage to see the various ways you can navigate through it with more abilities at your disposal. I remember many times beating my head against my desk, screaming expletives, then finally looking up someone else’s playthrough on YouTube and seeing them thinking to use a completely different method by which to clear a stage. This is often how you find hidden locations and secret items in stages as well, whether it be cassette tapes, which allow you to listen to the incredible chiptune soundtrack back at your hideout, saving lost puppies or kittens for a ninja holed up in Ryosuke’s hideout or finding power-ups that grant you access to more health or stamina, which you use to utilize your special abilities.

There are sections of Bat Boy that really test your mettle and your platforming abilities. I recall one of the three bonus stages took me nigh on two hundred attempts. Needless to say, I was thrilled when I finished it, but felt like a fool when I saw another player use a much simpler method for navigating the section of the stage that vexed me. When I completed every achievement on Steam and achieved 100% completion in the game, I felt on top of the world. It is a very satisfying game to beat, and the runtime for fully completing it took me roughly ten hours, which is absolutely perfect for me.  

Bat Boy never outstays its welcome or makes anything feel impossible, as long as you’re willing to think outside of the box in relation to your abilities or just hone your skills to the point of being pixel perfect. If you enjoy some of the greatest platformers that we’ve ever been blessed with, that list of stone cold classics that I have mentioned a couple of times in this review, then do yourself a favor and pick up Bat Boy, as it absolutely knocks it out of the park and into a league of its own.