Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut Critic Reviews

Shantae Risky’s Revenge is a fun, challenging adventure. Filled with difficult boss battles, tons of tricky puzzles, and all kinds of magic spells to learn. While it may be a little outdated, Risky’s Revenge will always be fun to play.

Shantae: Risky’s Revenge - Director’s Cut is a great metroidvania-style platformer that stands out for its great art design, fun characters, quirky sense of humor and for being entertaining from start to finish. It's a highly recommended title.

Risky’s Revenge is very much the Australopithecus of the Shantae series—something of a transitional form between the GBC game and Pirate’s Curse. It’s fun to play if you’re a fan of the series, but I’ll say that the next three games easily eclipse it.

Shantae: Risky’s Revenge – Director’s Cut still holds up reasonably well, offering up a mid-length Metroidvania experience with plenty of charming dialogue, secrets to uncover, and enemies to furiously whip with long purple hair. That being said, it’s also beginning to show its age, with a weird map system and more simplistic gameplay keeping it somewhat held back in the past. It's still an easy recommendation if you’re a fan of Shantae or are looking for a cheap entry into the franchise, but we’d also recommend that you first look into one of the other entries on Switch to see which is most right for you.

Shantae: Risky's Ravenge - Director's Cut is a testament to Shantae's quality and longevity as a series. This enhanced port of the sequel to the original game features several improvements over the original that fans are certain to appreciate, as well as elements that will be welcomed by fans of Metroidvania games. Recommended for both audiences as fun and wholesome proposal, now on the Nintendo Switch.

Part culmination of old-school classics, part a simplistic form of them all, Shantae: Risky's Revenge is not exactly the best title in WayForward's, otherwise charming, line of platformers. If a fan of Shantae do check it out, but you won't miss much by skipping it, and simply trying any other instalment - 2002 original included.