Developer: Rigel Gameworks
Publisher: Rigel Gameworks
Year: 2025
Genre: Platformer
System: Windows

BioMenace Remastered is a very recent rerelease of the shareware classic BioMenace, which adds lots of graphics customization options and updates, and a brand new 4th episode of levels. You play as Snake Logan, a man with a mullet and mustache who must stop an evil scientist from destroying the world or something like that. It’s not the most important plot. All you need to know is that you are a guy with a sweet mullet who needs to rescue a hostage on each level and then leave. Sometimes you fight a boss. And it’s great. It’s not even a game I had much nostalgia for, my memories of the game at release were my dad struggling to get the shareware to work on our computer for some reason. The game holds up surprisingly well though, especially compared to some of the other shareware games from that era that I have nostalgia for but may be harder for me to recommend to others.

There’s not really much more to say about the actual gameplay. It’s all very straightforward but I think it feels good running around and shooting at monsters. There’s a demo on Steam so if you find it enjoyable, the rest of the game is more of that. I mentioned before that I really liked the Crystal Caves remaster and even though this is by different devs, this feels like it builds on that and the Secret Agent remaster by offering even more graphics customization options as well as the extra episode and level builder that seems to be expected from these. If you want to play with the original graphics you certainly can, but the game’s new modern mode looked great to me and I actually stuck with that for most of the time. It even lets you enable and disabled various bits so if you want to play with the original art but in widescreen mode, you can! I believe these devs did a Duke Nukem remaster or rerelease for the Evercade that may have similar options, but I don’t own one so I can’t speak for that.

The additional episode 4 is great. It introduces a lot of new little level design tricks that keep it feeling fresh the entire time and the levels are a bit larger in scope so it takes more time to play through than the original three episodes. There’s a fun little cameo by someone from another shareware game that made me so happy when I saw it.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about this one. I think the game holds up and this seems like the ideal way of remastering these old shareware platformers. I hope it does well and we keep getting more of them. I know they exist for Crystal Caves, Secret Agent, and Monsters Bash (these being all by Emberheart), with one for Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure on the way, but I’ll keep playing more of them if they’re as good as the ones we’ve already got.

BioMenace Remastered is available on Steam