If you were born after the NES was in its heyday, the sparkly throwbacks now being released every couple of weeks might give you the impression that the era was just all killer, no filler for 10 beautiful years. In this dream world, , you need a certain number of stars to open up each stage, but you can earn additional stars per stage by getting through without dying and by beating the stage time record.

Sounds easy. It is decidedly not.

Early stages are a delight, with Rex blasting through coins, squeezing through tight corridors, and making split-second maneuvers to dodge lasers or avoid the walls. You're dead in one hit, so that old tension is here, keeping your reflexes sharp; It's challenging, but fun all the same. After the first boss, however, the difficulty spikes hard and fast. The game gets projectile-happy in a hurry, where tracking lasers and fire-spewing plants line every surface or are set up just past the outer limits of the screen where you can't see them, seemingly just begging you to try using your rockets. Tight squeezes are now less a matter of having a few tiles to move around but a scant few pixels. Boss fights aren't necessarily hard but tedious, with every hit doing minor chip damage at best. Around halfway through, the game ceases to be fun. It becomes a chore. Difficulty isn't a negative in and of itself, but its merits can be measured in a simple question: “Is it my fault I'm dying?” “Is there a flaw in my own skills that could prevent this?”

Increasingly, the game sits on the bad side of that question, where obstacles are surmountable seemingly by sheer luck more than skill. The game puts import on being able to nab more than one star from a stage to advance, but the time trial records are ludicrous, and dying becomes more and more a certainty; it is a recipe for seething hate. Your rewards for success often come down to little more than the money you've collected, which can be traded for insanely overpriced cosmetic items. In one of the stores you open early on, every item costs $100,000 coins. By the time I reached the final boss, I had $78,000. Troublesome economy aside, technical hitches are common, even on fairly straightforward stages and bosses, with the frame rate tanking and button presses ceasing to register when things get too busy.

Just like the most aggravating NES games, it's frustrating because there's fun to be had, and had often, in JumpJet Rex. It feels great to play, the aerial trickery is gratifying, and it's got a lot of goofy charm, but all of this is unfortunately buried under an inexplicable need to test players beyond what should be necessary in a galaxy where you tool around as a T-rex wearing sunglasses.