Review: Mega Man X Dive Offline Offers a Wealth of Ways to Play

Mega Man X Dive Offline is an interesting experiment, capturing years of content from the live-service mobile game Mega Man X Dive and turning it into a single-player experience. All that fretting about unlocking the characters you want in random draws? Gone. Just go get the character you want with in-game currency you unlock by playing levels. Missed a special event? Just go load it up. Cool skins, neat gear, and special unlockables are all at your fingertips just from playing the game. As someone who never played the mobile game, it’s so much fun, bite-sized content to play with. As a game, it’s a fantastic move toward preserving the history and efforts that go into many mobile games that normally disappear when they reach the end of service.

In this game, the digital world that contains the data from the Mega Man X series is a bit messed up. As the Player, you get called in to clean up the far-reaching mess that has spread throughout the various stages of the franchise. With that mess comes some strange placements for the various bosses and creatures you’ve fought over the years. Even the music itself tends to meander as you try to restore order to the place. The plot isn’t exactly deep stuff, but it’s enough to support the varied worlds you’ll explore throughout the game.

Mega Man X Dive Offline plays out over extremely short stages in its Story Mode. The levels rarely take longer than a few minutes to get through (especially if you rush). Initially, this had me feeling a bit disappointed. It feels a bit hard to settle into, at first, as it feels like you’re just getting into a good groove and then the stage ends. As someone who was juggling a house filled with sick kids while reviewing the game, though, I started to appreciate the brevity. I could play multiple stages when I had time to play more, or I could just leap into a short level when I only had a bit of time. It feels weird at first, but you eventually settle into something that feels right.

That’s not the only thing that takes some getting used to. If you’ve played the franchise before, you’re probably already comfortable with the dashing, wall-climbing, and general acrobatic movement of the game. That’s all there and it feels great. However, your weapons are VERY different. You can equip all sorts of different guns in the game, with dozens of options from basic Mega Buster shots to chain guns to sniper rifles. What’s even more different is how the game auto-aims for you. It aims your gun at whichever enemy is nearest, sticking to them until you finish gunning them down.

That SEEMS great, but it causes some issues throughout Mega Man X Dive Offline. For starters, it makes it difficult to prioritize another enemy when you need to. Say I lock onto a little trash foe, but some big, hulking enemy drops down behind me (which happens a lot during brief moments where the game locks you in an area until you clear out all the enemies). You have the option to manually aim to break the lock, but this is clunky to do in combat. I usually just tried to avoid the new enemy until the original thing I locked onto was dead. That can be even more difficult if you’re leaping around and your locked-on foe is on a higher platform or behind cover, resulting in taking some hits while you sort out an annoying situation that could be fixed if you just shot where you were facing.

That said, enemies come at you from all directions. Enemies that cling to ceilings or on higher levels don’t just get to take free potshots at you any more thanks to this auto-aim system. It’s very freeing when it’s working well, allowing you to hurtle through stages while shooting. It feels fantastic in those moments, and it’s only every once in a while where I run into the situation above. There’s also melee weapons you can equip that will swing close to your body, so there’s ways to work around it. I just tend to lean on the guns more, so the mechanic bugged me a bit during those times.

This problem can get a little more annoying due to the slightly dodgy hit detection. Mega Man X Dive Offline is very good about when your shots are striking enemies, but it felt like the hitbox on my character was a bit too big. I would get hit by things that felt like they should miss periodically, especially against bosses. It’s something you learn to adapt to by giving enemy attacks a wider berth, or by equipping defensive abilities through cards and chips (or unlocking weapon skills that protect you). It was a hindrance at first, but the game has systems in place to deal with the problem.

And there are A LOT of mechanics and oddball tools to go through. Weapons can be powered up by raising their Weapon Levels, increasing their rank by spending Memories of that weapon that you can collect or buy, you can upgrade individual abilities for that weapon, unlock and power-up unique skills for it, and connect Chips to give it unique quirks (and those Chips have their own levels, ranks, and Analyze mechanic themselves). Characters have ranks, skills, and cards they can equip, as well as a special DNA system that confers special power-ups. There’s a repository for your gear that also has a spot to create armor and enhance it (each piece has levels as well). There’s skills you can individually level and equip. It’s so much stuff to work through.

Mega Man X Dive Offline explains just about none of it. You will have to spend a great deal of time poking around menus and seeing what you need to do. Getting weapons and leveling characters is fairly straightforward if you just work your way through their respective menus top to bottom. It’s a lot of messing around in various areas to get your character up to speed, which can be annoying if you just want to get it over with and get into a stage. However, you’ll find yourself dying fairly quickly if you don’t take the time to figure out how the armor system works. Which the game never conveyed to me, and I had to look it up online. It’s a bit frustrating for someone coming into this game completely new, although if you putter around the various menus long enough, you’ll probably figure it out. I just wish it had been easier.

That said, you get lots of the game’s various currencies for just playing it, so when you figure out what you’re doing, you’ll be unlocking tons of stuff. The game constantly dumps Zenny (the basic currency), weapon experience, player experience, and Memories in your lap. I was gaining a level after beating every stage, getting new characters after a handful of levels, and had enough cash to boost weapons to extremely high levels. I could buy new special characters after only a few levels. I expected that wealth to end like it usually does in gacha games. Here, though, there’s no attempt to get real world money out of you. The game just offers you all of its content at a fairly reasonable in-game price and lets you go to town. So, that good feeling at the beginning of most of these games when you’re getting characters and stuff all the time. The whole game is like that.

And there is so much history contained in the unlockables in Mega Man X Dive Offline. There’s tons of characters from across the franchise, all of which have their own neat array of attacks on top of the weapons you equip. Magma Dragoon was a blast to dig out and use against the enemies after spending years dealing with his fiery strikes. I love the design of Zero from the Mega Man Zero games, so it was a treat to switch to him throughout the game. I also found I missed flying as Super Mega Man from Mega Man 6, which this game also busts out as a playable character. Since weapons and benefits transfer from character to character easily, it’s a snap to switch characters to the dozens of new possibilities in the game.

That’s where I found so much enjoyment in this title. I could freely grab a couple of new characters and just try them out for a stage or two. If I liked them, I could stick with them. I rarely did, as I could just unlock another few characters after playing a few more stages and try something wholly new. There’s just so much variety and fun in the available characters, and being able to afford them without parting with real-world money meant I could buy as many as I could afford. And I could afford a lot fairly quickly as the game is always loading you up with currency. Sometimes you might not know which stages you have to play to get them since the game doesn’t explain itself well, but you sort it out eventually.

That variety got me invested in the game. While I found myself bouncing off of Mega Man X Dive Offline at the start, that was because I was coming in expecting something that played closer to the Mega Man X games. This uses that franchise’s framework, but does so to create a Mega Man X playground that you can bounce in and out of. Once you learn its systems, it’s not terribly hard (although you can make it hard if you choose to by purposely ignoring the systems, so you can make it hard if you like). It IS a place where you can explore remixed versions of classic stages using unexpected characters while listening to various versions of the great stage music the series has had over the years. It’s just a lot of fun to mess around with.

Yes, I was hard on it at the beginning of this review. The auto-aiming is goofy. Hit detection isn’t great for your character. Stages can feel too short. There’ so many fiddly menus and things you need to level up before you’re really at a power level where you’ll survive. However, there’s so many different characters and skins and abilities and mechanics at play that are a lot of fun to mess with for a stage or two. You can unlock so much stuff just by playing the game that you’ll be hard pressed to exhaust it all without dumping a ton of play time into it. And the art and characters explore so much art and history from the Mega Man franchise in general that I was constantly delighted by what the game had to offer.

It took some time for me to warm up to Mega Man X Dive Offline, but it’s reached a point where I have a hard time putting it down. I had to boot it up a few times to verify details for the review, and the urge to play a single level or grab a character was strong. It’s a love letter to Mega Man, but it’s also something I hope to see from other mobile games as they reach end-of-service (although the NebulaJoy mobile global version isn’t going anywhere right now). All of this art and creativity and passion would normally be lost, but instead, we get access to it for a low price and can unlock and play with just about everything. It’s just a tremendous joy to play. Not to mention it is an important piece of, and a tribute to, Mega Man history that I am thrilled exists. I just hope we start to see other mobile games follow suit.

Mega Man X Dive Offline is available now on PCs.