Disclaimer: I understand the game is in development and not finalized. However, I doubt any changes made the game will affect my critique.

Mega Man W is, in summary, just another in a long list of Mega Man fan games that lacks any of the balance and charm of the originals it is trying to emulate.

Fake Difficulty: Like many Mega Man fan games and rom hacks, MMW relies on a slew of instant death traps in almost every stage; too many of them in my opinion. Cinder Lady's is by far the worst offender. I get that it is a fire-based stage with instant-death lava. But that does not mean that almost every single room MUST have instant death lava trap in it. There seems to be this mantra in the Mega Man fan game community that "Mega Man is supposed to be challenging" and yet classic Mega Man never seemed this challenging to me. The over-use of instant death mechanics is where 75% of this game difficulty comes from and that is not good balance.

Bolt Farming and Utility Woes: My advice if you play this game is don't bother playing it normally. Just farm bolts and get items before even trying to take out any robot masters. Yeah sounds boring and it is. Having to buy the charge buster and other common items that used to be standard (Rush Coil) is a step in the wrong direction even for a fan game. That and the fact that Rush Coil is a treated as a utility that has to be equipped meaning you cannot have it all the time since you have limited equip slots. The utility slot idea was ok. The fact that Rush got shoehorned into it instead of being independent of it was a bad idea.

Messy Graphic Design: There were far too many times I was left staring at a screen trying to figure out where I was supposed to go since a lot of the foreground and background bleed into each other and are hard to distinguish. There were a number of times I thought I was looking at a platform but it was just background. There is not enough contrast to tell a lot of stuff apart.

Music: I really hate talking about this. I love music in general, but there is something special about Mega Man music that makes it memorable and sticks with you. Not here. I could play any classic Mega Man, even for the first time, and at least one song would stick in my head and I could hum it to myself. Not here. The music in this game is repetitive, not catchy, and doesn't have melodies that stand out. They all sound like they are intros trying to set up for some melody that never happens.

Overall: I really wanted to like this game. It looked like it had a lot of promise from the streams of other people playing it. Playing it myself it had a strong start, but then went downhill really fast. It is funny how many people think they can do better than Capcom only for Capcom to do better.