The Mega Man series is without a doubt one of the most successful platform games ever. A lot of sequels were made all of them fairly good. A group of developers have now made a Mega Man inspired game called Hard Hat 3.

If you’ve played the original games you certainly remember the yellow Metool robots. They are now being phased out, as they are obsolete and new better robots enters the scene. You are a remaining robot and your job is to try to get rid of the new robots to be able to survive.

When first starting the game you notice that this production is much like Mega Man. The levels and graphics look the same, and the old 80s digital music is back. It seems as if the game was first ported to PC and then altered.

It might explain why the game is pretty slow to respond at times. Even on a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz the game is a bit slow in the beginning and doesn’t respond very well to keyboard commands. Sometimes they are processed too slowly; I know we are just talking nano-seconds, but it all that matter. It’s not fun to constantly ending up in a bottomless pit because the keyboard commands is processed too slow.

People running the game on higher resolutions will notice that it’s hard to get the game in full screen mode because the graphics get a bit blurred.

The robot that you play can do everything that Mega Man could but also protect itself with the help of the hard helmet, just as it did in the original games. There are also several weapons that you gather while playing.

There are a number of levels in the game, each with it’s own theme. Every level has an end boss, for example Artic Man. The levels before you actually challenge Artic Man are inspired by winter. I’ve always liked this system and it’s a shame that more platform developers don’t use it.

I love the fact that Damaged Games has started endeavors like this. There are a number of other old Nintendo and Sega classics in which the storyline can be changed and the games altered. Let’s face it; none of the old classics will ever get out of date or boring.

Overall Hard Hat 3 is a very good platform game. Damaged Games have changed a winning concept into another winning concept. The game is as addictive and fun as the Mega Man games. It’s great that you can play the game for free on a Windows machine. For the next version the keyboard has to respond quicker and the graphics might use some polishing when using high resolutions.