A Critical Look at Mega Man 2 Stages: Metal Man

Metal Man’s Stage and music.

The first thing we encounter here is a conveyor belt, which moves in the direction the arrows on the ends are pointing and cover roughly half the floor space in this stage. There’s also an E-Tank sitting right in easy reach, which is rather ominous. The first dangerous thing that appears is a Press, which does exactly what you think it does.

There are five Presses in total, then we enter a hallway filled with Moles, which slowly move across the screen vertically. They take five hits and can appear anywhere in front of you. These look dangerous, but since they won’t appear where Mega Man is standing, we can just move forward carefully. Once you get used to them, they’re pretty much a free refill on health and energy since they never stop spawning. This gets a little trickier after throwing a conveyor belt into the mix though.

After the Mole section, there are five whole screens of absolutely nothing interesting happening. Just wanted to point that out.

This is Pierrobot. He falls onto a gear as we enter the screen, then both fall to the floor and he rides it toward us. You can either shoot the gear (takes four hits) and he’ll fall offscreen, or kill him directly (one hit), making the gear slow down so you can deal with it more easily or just jump over it. He’s a fairly interesting enemy, but only shows up by himself for this section.

Immediately after those are a few Blockys, along with another E-Tank that is suicidal to go after without an item to cross the gap with. As it is, we can barely make it across from the top, bringing us into the path of a Springer.

There’s a few more Springers, followed by… the boss door. Huh.

While the stage first gives the impression that it’s going to be a tough trap-focused one, there’s really not much to it. Aside from fighting Moles on the conveyor belt, the stage just kinda throws one thing out there, then waits for us to deal with a few of them in turn before switching to a new thing. We never have to deal with more than one enemy type at once, nor do we have to make any particularly difficult jumps, like one would expect from a stage with moving floors.

That bit in the middle with nothing but a few jumps and an extra life on the side also makes an already somewhat short level feel even smaller. It makes for a decent stage to start with, but it has nothing to offer a player who’s been through a few already. I like that the machines in the background are animated and the music is one of my favorites out of the entire series, but there isn’t a lot else going for it.

LanceHeart