Katana ZERO

Warning! You know when games warn you for flashy lights, strobe effects, flickers and stuff if you have epilepsy? Well, this is THAT game. While the graphics stick together as a whole, the video replay thing is completely unnecessary and a bit annoying in my opinion. There are some parts where it is essential for the story telling, but otherwise… Speaking of which, the story is interesting but a bit of a “trip”, meaning it is not for everyone and requires a certain state of mind. At first you feel a bit underwhelmed, like “is that it, just jumping around, and slashing?”, then you get the hang of it, and just when you start to really enjoy it, the game gets difficult, and the fun is over. Difficulty alone would not be the problem. The problem is the fun does not increase proportionally with the difficulty. There is one truly beautiful thing about the game though that is unparalleled by anything similar. When you die, with just one click you can retry in 1 second. There is nothing more annoying than when you die in a game, you get some stupid death animation, and tattarattaaaa music or evil laughter or something, then a pause screen, then respawn, then you enter the fight screen and the boss appears, and flexes for like a minute, maybe he tells you about his weekend plans or something. And this game has none of that nonsense. Which is simply marvelous. Overall, it is a nice piece of art, but if you crave a decent retro style game this will not satisfy your thirst.

Katana Zero is a Hotline Miami inspired 2D action game. The gameplay is pretty good. You don't have many options per level though, so it feels a bit limited in that regard. The game is short, 4-5 hours for me. There's like one hour of optional stuff you can do. The atmosphere is incredible. The soundtrack is great, the pixel art beautiful, and the story and pacing are awesome. That said, it does end abruptly. I hear more content is coming, though I don't know in what form. If you appreciate weird and dark storylines and immerse yourself in the atmosphere, it's a great experience for its price. Not perfect though.

This game distorted my perception of time during every session so hard that I missed vital texts multiple times and kept playing for hours longer than I thought I had. Then I was at the last level. Pretty sure I need to play it again to see if any of the dialog options change things, or if I can make it through the really REALLY demanding stealth section, or....... look it's good, it looks great it sounds great it's funny, the gameplay is solid ... I love this game. I've been looking forward to it for ages, and it lived up to my hype level and then some. Also I know dialog isn't the MAIN focus of a game like this, but the dialog system is probably my favorite of any game ever.

I bought this game for the Artstyle, as many reviews claim, it's really beautiful. The gameplay is really fast and smooth. Very intense combat... ...but what I didn't expect, is how the story develops. You only get small pieces and at first I did not have the slightest idea of what's going on. I still don't have after three hours in, but that's also very fascinating. I don't want to spoil too much, that's why I won't tell movie references... the game is must very mindfucking and I like it 8)

... this is a great action platformer, with very good controls, terrific animation and 2D pixel art and enjoyable level design. My game counter displays 4 to 5 hours of gameplay which is quite decent for a game of this nature and pricing and while the "end" is open and prone to a followup, the game does stand on its own. I'm just not sure as to why they implemented the replay feature, in the end it really doesn't matter (as Linkin Park would sing) and I ended up skipping them altogether. All in all, one of this year's games to play.