 No strings. The endless parade of Super Nintendo Action Platformers continues. There's Jim Power, there's Musha, there's Excalibur 2097, there's Doomtroopers, SmartBall, Mohawk and Headphonejack, Mr Nuts, Pitfall The Mayan Adventure, Rocky Roden… I could lots like 2 dozen more but it's time to talk about Wolf Child. Hey, look it's yet another game originally made for the Amiga that made it over to the Super Nintendo just like Gods and First Samurai, and okay that's enough titles. What makes this one stand out from all the rest? To start with, there's a really dark story behind this one. You play as the son of a brilliant scientist. Dad was perfecting advanced gene splicing techniques, combining human and animal DNA to create soldiers to take on what the manual calls a confirmed sociopath named Drax, and his terrorist organization Chimera. Unfortunately they catch wind of what's being planned against them and destroy most of the laboratory, kidnap the scientist, and kill his wife and his eldest son. The dude's other son comes back to the lab, finds Project Wolf Child, and promptly turns himself into a werewolf, who happens to have psychic powers? Sure, okay. So the game has you infiltrating Chimera's headquarters as a regular dude at first. Okay, maybe not a regular dude, but some buffed out dude that looks like Van Hammer from early 90s WCW. You find items and crates you have to bust open, like smart bombs, you can use with the A button, and the lightning bolt icon which will turn you into a half man, half wolf with a projectile attack which you can upgrade up to 8 times, eventually evolving into a spread gun, and later something that protects you like a rotating shield you'd find in something like a shoot em up. The thing is, you have a limited number of projectiles you can use, and once you run out you go back to your default fireball thing. You can switch between each pattern using the X button, but still, that's really a bummer because if there was a no ammo limit this might actually be a decent speedrun game. As it is, this game is the definition of okay-ish, the controls are certainly good, the level design is adequate while not having anything original, but that's fine. If there's any problem holding this game back, it's the enemy design. The enemies and bosses have the exact same patterns regardless of what you do. And I know a lot of games do that, but it's really noticeable here. Like on the first level boss, no matter what you do, he's gonna fly in from the right and hang in on that side and fire to the left. Or the second level boss, it's always gonna have the same pattern. Most regular enemies either drop in the same designated spots over and over, or they're just standing there. Again, I know lots of games do this, but they do a better job of disguising it if that makes sense. Here, it's just stale, and it makes for kind of a boring play through. Anyway, if you take too much damage, you revert back to your human form and are left with just a fist attack, just like in First Samurai. There's other stuff here too, like collecting letters. In the words extra in bonus, extra gets you an extra life, and bonus gives you another 20,000 points. Whoop-de-doo. These letters are usually hidden within every level behind cheap tricks like false walls that could be absolutely anywhere. And while there's no time limit, I didn't feel any real incentive to go looking for them. No saves or passwords here, but there's only five total levels, and holy crap, the last two levels drag on and on. There's three lives and three continues, and there are checkpoints here, but continues will have you start from the beginning of the level. The obvious comparison here is the game I mentioned earlier, First Samurai. That one's also an action platformer that was developed for the Amiga, and that's also the better SNES port. Wolf Child isn't bad, but a lot here falls flat. The visuals and environments are pretty cool. The music holds up its end of the bargain. The different projectiles are cool, but First Samurai had a chaotic feel to it that this game does not, and the boss fights were much better in that game. In Wolf Child, the big flaw is the enemy pattern design. I mean, the flunkies and a beat-em-up like Rival Turf have more engaging patterns than anything here. Wolf Child is just okay at best and boring at worst. It's not bad, but I don't blame you if you pass on this one.