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.