Slave Zero

Great 3rd person shooter wherein you're a great big robot, battling it out in the city. Fight a variety of robots with a variety of guns in some fairly good levels. Not exceptional, but certainly holds up pretty well and there is unfortunately not a great number of games like this.

In the 1990s, Mech games were really popular. Most were simulations, but a few more arcade-inspired action titles popped through the cracks, case in point: Slave Zero by Test Drive creators Accolade. Slave Zero is a third person twitch shooter inspired by 1990s anime like Macross Plus, Neon Genesis Evangelion and The Guyver: You play as the eponymous Slave Zero, a bio-organic machine inhabited by the brain of a rebel named Chan, as he does battle against a fiendish dystopian government ruled by the sinister Sovereign Khan. And that's all there is to it: A bio mech blasting the snot out of other mechs. AND IT'S CRAZY FUN. Slave Zero lasts four-to-five hours, and has a simple, yet fun gameplay loop of destroying anything that stands in your way. The controls feel weighty and satisfying, the weapons destructive, and the art design and soundtrack are utterly fantastic. It's arcade shooting at its best. Levels are nice and vertical, with you scaling up and down buildings in the megacity and running down corridors and sewers. Not to mention it makes you FEEL like you're playing as a mech: You can grab cars and throw them at enemies, you can stomp on the ground to create shockwaves, you can let out a mechanical roar, it's awesome! However, it is flawed: The last third does take a turn for the Kingpin-Unbalanced, with the enemies becoming more cheaper, levels more choking, and bosses more unfun. Not to mention certain quirks like movement jets only being available when strafing. Due to the cult status, and the game being bought out by indie publisher Ziggurat, you'd expect that there will be a sequel to fix these flaws. And there is... BUT it's a generic Indie 2D side-scrolling action game with the name slapped on (Slave Zero X). I don't even need to tell you to avoid that load of In-Name-Only blandness and buy this instead; even with its flaws, it is a satisfying mech game that scratches an itch very few can.

This game has you playing as the eponymous “Slave Zero”, a giant biomechanical robot, in his fight against a dictatorship. Some effort was put in the storytelling of this game, with a lot of cutscenes and voice acting. Yet, the reason you need to play it is its insane amount of action. Slave Zero is, through and through, a huge shooting gallery. The levels are linear, clearly showing you where to go next, and at every single turn, entire legions of tanks, choppers and other mechs are waiting to attack you. Moments of relief are pretty much nonexistent: I am not joking when I say that 95% of the time, you will hear the sound of weapons firing and stuff exploding around you. It can get repetitive, but it's generally pure fun. The movements are fast, much more so than what you would expect from a ten store-high mech suit, but the tiny vehicles at your feet and the giant buildings around you are pretty good reminders of the actual scale of your character. To match your giant stature, you can also use cars as throwing weapons, which is neat. There are three types of weapons and you can only carry one of each at a time: they get more powerful yet more unwieldy throughout the game, forcing you to carefully consider the pros and cons before picking a new one. The game starts off fairly easy but gets more and more challenging, the bosses especially are all pretty tight and often leave your life and ammo meters in a sorry state. This version, even though it apparently solves most compatibility issues of the original release, still may require a bit of tweaking to run properly – to get a decent framerate, I had to install fanmade patches and run it on D3D mode, instead of the better-looking Glide mode, and I still experienced FPS drops and crashes, notably in the final mission. Still, if you are looking a bit of late 90's mindless action that you may not have played yet and can handle a little bit of repetitivity, Slave Zero is a good pick, especially at this low price.

Although there are many flaws, I fell in love with this game. You are the gigantic robot named Slave Zero, and far far better than anybody else around you. There are huge concrete jungle, hovering cars, people crying for help and you can literally destroy them all! Weapons are big, make everything in its bullet's past explode like hell. Enemies are also huge robot like yours, but you can smash them with ease! Also I'd like to mention about designs in this game. The city itself is soooo magnificent that I even wanted to live in there and things in the city like weird signs contains a lot of Japanese letters, unbelievably tall buildings and also so many decent robots running around, are all some sort of dreams-comes-true stuffs. Bosses are unique considering the time of its release and you really need to be careful with your resources. It is a great stimulus within the merciless killing. Wow, I didn't even imagine that I could finally beat this game, and it's in the year of 2014. Thank you, thank you GOG.com!

I never had a chance to play it as a kid so this was the first time I ever picked it up and honestly, it's super fun even without the nostalgia factor that I'm sure many people today have for this game. It's not really about deep storytelling or complex gameplay - it's a game where you pilot a giant robot and blow sh*t up - and you blow it up good. The sense of scale doesn't really feel right and the robot you control is just too nimble and fast to really feel appropriate for the scale the game is presenting, but that's not a problem at all. It's more like playing with action figures with stacks of books imitating the buildings so it does kinda require you to use that childlike imagination a little. Bottom line is that the action is fun, tight, and exhilarating and that's what matters the most in this type of game. I don't know if it's possible to have nostalgia for something that you never played before, but I guess this game does just that. And it's probably because it's so very emblematic of the times in which it was made. Those low-poly graphics, distinctly 90s sci-fi aesthetic, simplistic plot, and a big focus on high-octane action... Robots, dystopian future, techno music, and that classic third-person shooting style that was all but gone by the time when over-the-shoulder games like Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War took over the market. All of this makes Slave Zero feel like the game that you swear you've seen somewhere as a kid, and because of that, it's still great to pick up and play, even if you never did it before. I would have given it a max rating if it wasn't for the technical issues. I had to download an external patch to get the DirectX mode to run so that I could enable the fancy graphical effects, and the game refuses to run in fullscreen so I had to play it in a window. Plus there's a weird issue with dynamic lightning where too much of it in the scene makes the framerate chug like hell.