Rygar

The Good
For it's time it had pretty good graphics, sound and playability. Lots of brilliant colour, and lots of action. An early entry into adventure games, it set the stage for the genre. Lots of side scrolling action, with the occasional twist of having to scroll up. Good escalation of monster difficulty, with the monsters getting harder to kill and more of them.
Fun weapons, and action. Challenging and fun. The music is original and stays with you.

The Bad
There is no safe feature for this game! It is surprising that for such a somewhat deep game, with lots of levels to go through, that they never made an ability to save and continue. In order to beat the game you either had to play straight through, or pause and leave the game running.
This was an odd game visually! On a lot of stages, the side scrolling not only was linear, but at the SAME time you had to navigate in a 3rd dimension, which is very hard to do on a 2 dimensional game/screen. It was especially hard to jump in this mode!
Not much help in this game, other than some old man giving you a hint once in a blue moon, so you had to find things hit and miss style. Rygar's primary weapon is a kind of yo-yo shield thing, that can be upgraded as you progress into the game. The upgrades make it reach longer and hit harder. You also need to find a few other tools to progress, but without the help it gets hard to find and tedious. This is especially brutal considering there isn't a save function.

The Bottom Line
An adventure game that was OK for it's time. Today, a fun game to fool around with if your bored. Has it's moments, and can be challenging! A kind of rough around the edges old school classic.