I want to state my purpose here up front: I want to praise Slave Zero X because I think it’s the kind of game I’d like to see more of made. It’s a genuinely impressive package, but I also think there are a lot of glaring issues with the title that will make many people hate it. So let’s do a compliment sandwich and do some constructive criticism.

Slave Zero X is, if nothing else, oozing with style. The art is full with biopunk monstrosities and sexy twinks. The music is brimming with cyberpunk arpeggios, wailing guitars, and thumping breakbeat. The spritework is beautiful and intricate, and watching this game in motion (especially a skilled player) can be a thing of beauty. You can unlock special shaders, which I think is a fun touch. If nothing else. This is a small easter egg, but I also think it’s really cool that the levels in the Episode Enyo prequel are actually based on the 3D environments you move through in this game.

I also love the boldness of its narrative. It is unabashedly gay, for one, but I also think there is a deeper subtext of sex and gender here, of being at war with ones own body and seeking to reshape it. There is also an anarchist bent to its politics, which tie into Hegelian dialectics of power and rejects all authorities it can, be it government or gods. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s super highbrow. It’s all over the place. The lore bites range from some silly notes to eerie eschatological poetry. It’s very brash and loud. There’s a vulgarity to it, both in its satire and in its visuals, that feels like this hideous, pulsating mass of raw anger.

Okay, let’s change gears. Most people who say they like hard games are kind of lying, including me. What they mean is that they want games that are hard in specific ways. They want games that challenge them in familiar ways. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people say, “I like hard games, but this is just unfun”; sometimes it’s coming from my own mouth. Games like Volgarr the Viking come to mind, unrelenting and unorthodox challenge boxes. Ugh, I’ll try to keep this short. The point is that “hardness” is a nebulous and subjective thing that is seen as something that we can mark objectively and quantitatively, even though the exact ways in which a game is hard or unfair depends on so many variables intersecting. I’m not making a novel point here, but that’s why some games get lauded for their difficulty and others are scorned.

I think that’s what Slave Zero X is. A game that is hard in ways people usually don’t want. That’s partially because of its ambition: it wants to be a fighting game and an action game in one. I think Slave Zero X wants to be Strider 2 but ends up being more like Ninja Warriors Return. And hey, that’s not a bad thing at all. What I mean is that combat in Slave Zero X, like in Ninja Warriors Return, tends to be very flat. You can launch and juggle people in the air, sure, but the majority of the game is forward movement. I really think the game could have done with a lot more verticality, but that also might have resulted in new issues. But it also ends up feeling a bit repetitive at times.

But if you run through this game mashing the light attack button, you will eventually hit a brick wall, and wonder why the game is punishing you. That’s partially because the game isn’t very good at communicating to you what’s going on. The tutorial is quite bad; it just throws a dozen pages of text explaining the mechanics at you once and then sets you loose. But it goes deeper than that, I think. For example, you have a parry that you execute by pressing a direction toward the attack, but since it has no animation and is in a very small window, it’s often not clear when or why you’re missing the mark with your timing. You get a score at the end of sections, but it's not super clear why you got a better or worse score, which should be one of the best ways to communicate to a player how they're doing. And while there’s a training room, all that really helps you with is comboing. And comboing does feel great here, it really does. But that’s also not the thing you need the most practice on in order to beat the game.

I think the key issue with Slave Zero X comes down to encounter design. One of the common action game design paradigms right now is a style that sees players progress through a series of arenas where enemies funnel in as you fight through them for some amount of time before eventually moving on. This is often paired with a combat system that produces self-sustaining feedback loops (recovering health or ammo, that is) that sort of dictates the flow of combat. As pointed out by one Campster, this kind of structure often lead to combat feeling pretty samey, as the pace of combat is entirely determined by the player and thus does not often get disrupted. But this trope has its place, and can be done well, but in order for it to be fun for long periods of time, you often need to be introducing new mechanics and enemies on a pretty frequent basis, which doesn’t really happen here.

Slave Zero X’s arenas end up feel awfully repetitive. New enemies aren’t introduced often, and you have to fight hundreds of them. The screen will often be filled with dozens of identical enemies for you to hack away through, which can be okay as fodder, I guess, but these masses can combo you, often for a long time. If you don’t have Burst up, you just have to lie back and take it for however long they juggle you. And getting combo’d is one of those classic things thats fun to do to an enemy but never for an enemy to do to you. It’s no coincidence that Slave Zero X is at it’s best when you’re fighting a small number of enemies rather than in its massive cavalcades of fodder.

A lot of the tougher enemies have attacks with insanely fast windups that lead into combos; even in a one-on-one fight I couldn’t really counter them consistently. They’re so fast that I think they may be literally impossible to parry reliably, and even if they’re not, they might as well be for most players. This is all exacerbated by the encounter design, which means that will all the enemies being thrown at you, it is often hard to tell what’s hitting you, let alone predict it and counter.

So when you’re not successfully juggling armored cops and parrying like the cyberninja you’re supposed to be, you’re often getting bodied and juggled in a way that makes you feel powerless. The result is a game that will frustrate most players. I’m not going to backseat game design and act like I know exactly how to fix it, though I definitely have ideas. But that is the reality: this is a game that’s hard in a way that many people will reject. It’s unfortunate, because I think with changes, it could be a much stronger and approachable game with a wider appeal.

But despite all these issues, I can’t say I think it’s a bad game. It’s a mess, yes, but it’s got so much style, so much ambition, and it’s combat does feel great when it works. During the right boss fight or the right set up of enemies, it feels like a dynamic flurry of blades, and you’ve somehow mastered it at the center of it all. While you’re not given a lot of opportunities for customization of your kit, your kit feels good to begin with. X-Shou feels sort of sticky and rigid in a way that is very novel, making in a distinctive feeling combat where a lot of your movement is done through attacks and dashes rather than running or walking. You juggle and bounce and parry and slash and gib fascists. It can be a blast.

Again, this is a game I want to see more games like. I want to see games that take inspiration from the arcade era, that are ambitious in their design, that go hogwild on their fiction, that inexplicably reboot forgotten titles as completely different games, that are gay and radical and flashy and deranged, that are extra in every way possible, that are like Slave Zero X is.

At the same time wonderful and compelling and infuriating. Please enjoy reading and parsing five different indicators to figure out where to stand/float. Sometimes the timing is a little ambiguous. Sometimes we've decided to not show which way that knockback is going. I dunno, fuck it. If you do this a hundred times in a row, fighting your way back to the boss each time, you'll start to memorize it. Especially if you play a slow class that can't actually move far enough in the 0.4 seconds we have provided you to see, parse, and position. With friends, it's a bit more manageable and more fun, which means the game has successfully accomplished its stated goal of recreating the raiding experience as I remember it playing Final Fantasy IV. Everyone being an anime lesbian bunnygirl adds to that.

There's a pretty good balance of powerups that change your rotation without really changing what you need to do in a fight. That's usually something I'd call 'bad' but I think it fits with the goals of the game, and I've seen much worse (Hades).

I repeatedly quit the game in disgust only to boot it up again shortly after, which is the mark of a type of quality. Or a horrible compulsion loop but there's not enough grinding in Rabbitsteel for this to be the case I think. I've definitely started thinking that normal difficulty is much too easy and hard is much too tough, which makes the existence of a higher difficulty absolutely terrifying.

Also, is Assassin just terrible? She doesn't seem to do any damage. I want to play the cool knife bunny come on. I want to satisfy my primal urge to stab.