Slave Zero

This is a good run-and-gun game from the Dreamcast era. You run around in a giant mech in a city (and the sewers beneath it) destroying the forces of the evil regime. The cyberpunk themes are spot on, even if some of the settings, such as the aforementioned sewers, can be a bit lacking at times. The weapons are fun with a decent variety, none of which feel too overpowered or too weak for the job. Nothing feels "cheap" and the health and ammo are fairly placed. ...That is until you get to the final boss. The last boss is such a weird difficulty spike that is only further driven home by the fact that only two weapons seem to work on it and there is only a finite amount of ammo available. It legitimately seems that the only way to win is to properly time your ultimate weapon (which has a charge up time after you press fire) to hit a small hitbox on the boss and hit every single one PERFECTLY. Perhaps I just missed something, but even looking online didn't seem to show anything different from what I was doing. I'll admit that I had to throw on a trainer to give myself an extra ammo replenishment just to beat it. This seems like either an oversight by the devs or perhaps a glitch. Other than that, the game is great.

This was one of the first games I got with my Dreamcast back in the day, so it SHOULD have some sort of nostalgia points backing it up... but the game is just awful. Awkward controls, a pointless plot you never even begin to care about, and combat that just isn't fun or smooth in any way. Thankfully I had other gems on the Dreamcast, but Slave Zero was never even "OK."

works on windows 11 too, thank you gog!

This game is short, action gameplay, 1st or 3rd view, old-school shooter, 20 years old. Still worth it 💥💥💥

Initially a fun and mindless third-person shooter, Slave Zero gets a 1 star from me for two reasons. First, it barely works. The game appears to have some kind of memory leak that causes immense slowdown in certain areas on the game. The only fix for this is to quit the game completely and restart. You're free to save any time, but quitting and reloading quickly becomes tiresome. You can try to press on despite the horrible slowdown, but there's at least one boss who is almost impossible to beat so long as the game lags. My second issue with the game stems from the gameplay. You have a melee attack, but it's so slow and clunky that it's only useful for leveling buildings. This is a problem because there never seems to be enough ammunition in later levels, and the design of Slave Zero actively encourages shooting as much as you can at everything that moves. For me, Slave Zero wasn't worth it.