 Starstruck! If you can't tell, I'm a little caught up in these old NES action platformers. Metal Storm, Powerblade, Vice Project Doom, Journey to Silius, I'll get to that. And now Low G-Man, or Low Gravity Man. The reason for this honestly goes back to a childhood curiosity. I remember tagging along with my childhood friend to rent an NES game, and I'd see all these games available, and to my underdeveloped brain, they all looked exactly the same to me. Run around and shoot stuff, beat the boss, blah blah blah. It's like why bother with that when Mega Man is right there? And while that's true to a certain extent, I still want to find out what's behind some of these games. The previous games I mentioned were all pretty well done in their own distinct way, but Low G-Man is just goofy. Yeah, it's a side-scrolling action platformer, but your weapon this time is a freeze ray. You freeze any enemy you come across, mount it, and stab it six or seven times with a spear. What? Look, I understand you gotta be different, and you gotta do something with your game to stand out, but this is ridiculous. It's like, okay, you're equipped with a poison gas, you spray on enemies, and then you kick them in the shins until they die. To paraphrase Han Solo, what's wrong with a good old-fashioned blaster? So yeah, needless to say, this attack method gets tedious pretty quickly. There are other weapons like boomerangs and bombs, but they run out pretty quickly. There are also vehicles you can commandeer, surprisingly. You steal them from enemies, but again, they don't last very long. I will say the jump mechanics here, or the low gravity, so to speak, are pretty fun since you can upgrade your ability to the point that you can jump and float around pretty much anywhere on the screen. Jumping through screens is pretty awesome, but the level design sadly doesn't allow for that very often. One thing I gotta point out that I can't stand in games like this, is that there's an item here that you have to avoid, the red potion. It decreases your life by half. It just comes across as cheap, artificial difficulty that makes up for lackluster enemies and level design. The story is kinda goofy, too. Thanks to the inventions of hyperspace travel and anti-gravity, the human race is now colonizing anything and everything. Because we can, I guess. This vague alien race says, Hey, back the hell off. And in retaliation, takes over a robot reproduction plant to create an army to defend themselves. Okay, I'm slanting my commentary here to be sympathetic toward the enemy, but seriously, I'm on Team Aliens. They have every right to defend themselves. Humans can go piss up a rope. They really need to colonize, frickin' everywhere. Doesn't that make US the enemy? The graphics here are very drab, as ordinary as it gets. And some of the backgrounds are downright ugly. The music is okay, it fits the game well enough, and I gotta say the sounds of spearing an enemy and picking up an item are pretty satisfying. If I had to sum up Low G-Man, I'd have to do it with a sound rather than a word. A sound like, ehhh... Not even meh, because it's barely slightly better than meh. The game has some decent ideas. I like stealing enemy vehicles. Jumping around all over the place is kinda fun. But the level design doesn't do enough with these abilities. And yeah, the visual presentation here is lousy, and there's not enough of a hook here to provide any replay value. If you check out Low G-Man, you'll probably end up playing for a few minutes before getting pretty bored. It's okay, but not going out of your way to track down.