Review: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind (Nintendo Switch)

I never thought I would have to put the following words together in print, but, for the sake of this review, here they are: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. There, I said it. But even though I was disinclined to watch the ‘90s TV show, I have a more favorable opinion of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind.

“Rewind” is definitely what we get. The graphics are a bit old school with a dash of CRT vibes. The imagery is true to the show, albeit slightly pixelated. The music for the game seems to be an easy drop-in of some of the musical themes from the show, which helps keep Rita’s Rewind true to the source material. With all the appropriate visuals and sounds in place, I’m sure the fans of the show will be well pleased. For those who didn’t watch the show but still want to play the game, the overall effect is a bit retro, but well done.

The only audio gripe I have, and it is a personal thing and possibly particular to certain types, is the overly repetitive sound bites spoken by the characters. The first two or three times I heard my character say a particular phrase, I thought “OK, now I know what he said, and I get it”. After about the fourteenth time hearing it in one game session, I was a little more than over it. If this repetition doesn’t bother you, or you can tune it out, then it’s no biggie.

As with the TV show, there is a story to be had with this game. Our baddie, Rita, has a time machine, and her future self is coming back to team up with her past self just to give you a hard time.

She brings along her host of horribles, including putty people, flying nasties, dudes with a big rock, and a gold armored monkey-man (yes, Goldar).

Since this is yet another origin story, you get to see the horror in the eyes—er, that is circuits—of Alpha 5 when he’s instructed to find some (cue dramatic music) teenagers. In an effort to be true to the teenageryness of our heroes, they can spend some time in a café equipped with some people they can talk to and some video games they can play. There are some parts missing (from the video games, not the people), but if you are thorough in your finding stuff skills, you should be able to find the repair parts along the way.

That whole “along the way” part is where the game gets a bit more challenging. Much of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind looks like a 2D side scroller. While the bulk of the game progression happens in left-to-right screen travel, there is within each scene the ability, and necessity, to move around in three dimensions. For certain rounds/levels, the game switches to a 3D view as you travel forward and dodge to the left and to the right as you fight the boss.

There are even places reserved for fighting with your Dinozord and with the combined Megazord. I must confess that the fighting style you need to use with the Megazord was not what I expected, and it left the game feeling a bit flat during that round. It wasn’t all bad, just a bit slow and clunky. I suppose a giant fighting bot would be slow and clunky, but it was a significant disadvantage against the opponent.

There are three difficulty settings in the game, so you get plenty of replay value whether playing on your own or with up to five other single-system rangers.

The controls are responsive and not overly sensitive, which is good for the small scene combat areas that are also filled with plenty of inanimate objects to break for coins, food, and other interesting stuff.

One thing which seemed a bit overdone is the controller rumble. Since this is basically a combat game, the controller is rumbling most of the time, which starts to lose meaning and which becomes another irritant.

As I noted at the top of the article, I was never a fan of the show, but Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind is actually a rather good arcade fighting game. If you can either ignore the cheesy factor, or better yet, embrace the cheese, you’ll find it served with a coherent story, plenty of combat action, ongoing bad jokes and puns, a slightly neurotic robot, and a time traveling baddie to defeat.

Go go give it a shot, but don’t forget to only use your weapons for defense, as you’ve been trained.