Xardion is a strange mash-up of a bunch of different video game elements. It has side-scrolling robot action like Turrican, it has level and enemy design like Contra, it has hidden areas and upgrades like Metroid, and it has RPG elements like, well, RPGs. It also has a robot panther. For a game with so many awesome aspects, it’s surprising it isn’t higher on most peoples’ SNES nostalgia lists.

The premise is the standard 8-bit/16-bit sidescroller action justification. Strange star system, warring aliens, pilot robots, blah blah blah. It really doesn’t matter except near the end of the game when the titular Xardion appears. Even then, it doesn’t matter all that much. The plot is just a flimsy justification to take your robots to a high-tech planet, a jungle planet, a fire planet, and so on.

The action is simple side scrolling goodness, with a few great additions. Instead of just one character, players can switch between three characters on the fly. Triton is your standard walking, gun-toting Gundam-type robot, Alcedes is a melee robot with an energy whip, and Panthera is the robot panther that can get into small spaces. Each robot has its own stats and abilities, and the more enemies you kill as a given robot, the more powerful that robot gets. There are also several upgrades scattered over the levels that give each robot new powers.

Xardion’s one big weakness is that it’s very, very short. It consists of just four levels and seven stages, and you can easily polish off the game in less than an hour. While you can backtrack and level grind and pick up every stray powerup in the game, there simply isn’t much there besides the four levels. There’s plenty of variety across the stages, but it still ends up being shorter than Contra.

If you want to give Xardion a try, get ready to hunt eBay and boutique game shops. It’s not available on the Virtual Console, and it hasn’t seen a remake, sequel, or any other attention since its release 18 years ago.