Slave Zero X Review (The Boogeyman)
Slave Zero X is a game I really want to like, but I just can't bring myself to say that I truly enjoyed my experience.
Initially slave zero will capture you with its extremely beautiful art style, wonderful voice acting/dialogue and world building. The sound design make the slashes of your sword have great audio feedback. Which culminates into my favourite thing from this game, Hercules, the first boss. His visual design, motivations, voice acting, the way he is built up is all wonderfully done, but this is a video game and not a show or visual novel. That means at the end of the day gameplay is king.
The gameplay of the Slave Zero X is very poorly designed. On the surface its a 2.5D beatem up that mixes in some fighting game mechanics from games like Street Fighter and Tekken. The problem for me shows up when it comes to enemy design. Certain enemies have grab attacks that if you do not dodge or perfect parry, will cause you to be locked into an animation. Grab attacks are not innately bad, but if the enemy decides do spam this attack or there are multiple of enemies with grab attacks, well you are guaranteed to be dead because you have no recovery frames or at least not nearly long enough to avoid this. In general you can be chain stunned which is a terrible feeling because there is no way of escaping it in this game. Because of this most large enemy packs or elite enemies are more difficult than the actual bosses. I would say easily 90% of my deaths were due to this.
On top of this issue, even though the game has many different attacks that can be chained together, you will be spamming the same combo almost through the entire game. The combo is three light attacks into your side heavy. If its a basic enemy, elite enemy, or a boss, if they are not flying in the sky you will end up using this combo. Its fast and does the most damages/stuns enemies. Its fun at first but after 5 hours of spamming the same combo gets to be a bit boring.
The game has a form of a "super mode" that you build up after damaging enemies and taking damage. It lets you spam certain special moves, makes you attack faster, but more importantly, its the only way to recover your health in the game (well other than dying and restarting from a check point). The designers decided that the health recovered from this is only given to you AT THE END of the super mode. Did you nearly full clear and entire enemy gauntlet and used your super to recover almost 90% of your health? Well too bad that you did not end it early because now you will be chain stunned to death before you can even benefit from it. You should just regenerate your health from the damage you deal when in your super mode.
The game never changes at any point. Other than some new enemies and unique boss fights, you will never unlock new moves or powers. All the moves and abilities you start with will be what you have at the end of the game. Thank god the game is only 4 to 5 hours long, well written and voice acted otherwise there would be no reason for me to have finished it.
The final reason I am giving this game a negative review is because the game made me repeat the final phase of the last boss for no reason. After beating it, I selected continue and it just repeated. Is it on purpose? I don't think so because it replays the cutscene and nothing changes. Thankfully the fight isn't that tough and I was able to beat it again, but if it was I may have given up finishing the game all together.
In the end, Slave Zero X is a game that has some of the best art, character design, beautiful voice acting and world building I have seen in a game, but its all brought down due to boring gameplay and horrible enemy design.
Get it if you want, but don't say I did not warn you.