This week brought some welcome news with a glut of Mega Man announcements, all of them including the Switch as a platform. Perhaps most exciting was confirmation of Mega Man 11, which is coming to all current-gen systems - and most importantly the Switch! - in late 2018.

It's a while away yet, then, but some snippets of details have come out via Game Informer, which has featured Mega Man 11 as its cover game for the January issue. With the digital version of the cover story live Rockman-Corner and USGamer have picked out some neat details; we've included a few below, but by all means pick up the magazine if you want the full lowdown along with pretty pictures, interviews etc.

  • There'll be four difficulty options. "Normal" will be as expected, but "Superhero" should challenge skilful veterans.
  • The Robot Masters are former allies of Dr. Light, and this one will allow you to tackle all eight from the start in any order. That's the norm that many are used to, but don't forget that some Mega Man games have split these stages into a couple of tiers, so it's nice to have all eight as targets from the get-go.
  • There'll be a weapon wheel applied to the right stick, which could mean quick switches between them if you remember which is assigned to each direction. Also, as you can see in the trailer the slide move is back, but the final controls for that aren't yet decided.
  • The gears seen under the health bar in the trailer and screens relate to "an entirely new gameplay mechanic that will impact Mega Man's moment-to-moment action". Not much more is said on that, but we get a glimpse of it right at the end of the trailer when Mega Man is surrounded by some sort of destructive field, with the gears spinning away in the top left.

All good stuff, and we're looking forward to seeing more on Mega Man 11 throughout 2018. Here's hoping it lives up to expectations.

[source gameinformer.com, via rockman-corner.com, usgamer.net]