It almost feels like a rhythm game at some points. This is an arcade-like twich platformer, but instead of tricky platforming sections and precise jumps, the most important gameplay aspect in Katana Zero is to perfectly calculate when and where to deliver fatal slashes to kill every single enemy onscreen in order to proceed to the next level. I need to commend the developers for making something that ultimately feels fresh despite the obvious nods to other games. You can see a bit of Sekiro, a bit of Meat Boy / Celeste, a bit of Furi and a lot of Hotline Miami thrown into the mix. Five.You can see nods to many other games right in the first few minutes of Katana Zero. Turn here, strike here, jump here, Molotov. When you have the ability to loop back as you work your way forward, the whole thing becomes scheduling. There didn't seem to be a button press involved, it was almost like the game was responding to my impulse as I waited for patrols on the other side to synchronise with my own horrible schedule. It took me an age to work out how the game actually handles it. More than anything I love the process of opening doors. The lovingly crafted way that bodies collapse to the ground, the weirdly brilliant Chopin pastiche in the therapist's room, the puff of flames as a molotov hits a chain of barrels, the shake of a police van coming to a halt. It's the almost invisible details that make it sing. How do you want to tackle it knowing what you know now? How do you want to ace it? How do you want to tackle the next five seconds? Well that went badly. There's a lot of fun had with the themes for the various locations you work through, yet the whole thing retains the immediacy of a game built around very simple, and brutish, delights.
Boss fights are surprisingly entertaining for a game in which most scraps are over in nanoseconds. Smoke canisters are fun, as are stealth sections where you've switched the lights off and slip past shadows, returning with a flamethrower. Variation never seems to weaken the appeal. And then trying to do it, and then trying to do it again. You on one side of the door planning what to do with the people on the other side. Nice as all this stuff is, though, the game lives in doorways, just as Hotline Miami did. Katana Zero has real narrative ambitions, plenty of mysteries and dream sequences, and it's all enlivened by a conversation system that allows you to interrupt, to obfuscate, to shut people down as if chat itself was a rhythm action game. Creepy conversations with a therapist - they are a therapist, right? - and sad nights alone in an apartment with cable news unspooling the story of your latest atrocity and interesting neighbors through the walls. An antihero veteran navigating PTSD and addiction to a drug that allows them precognition abilities, a grim throwback cyberpunk world of trashed lots and ragged tenements. There are elaborate justifications for all of this. When you finally make it to the end of one of the game's shortish scenarios intact? Then you commit, and you get to watch a polished playthrough of what you've just done - your solution to a bloody temporal puzzle - played out on CCTV. And beyond all that, there's the conceit that the game's action is played out in your mind as you try and retry each encounter, looping back through time with each failure and finding the best way to tackle the groups of foes you encounter in this finely-calibrated 2D world. You have a sword attack with a decent reach. Yet despite the variations - the mine carts, boss fights, bikes-versus-helicopters, armoured baddies and explosive chuckables - for the most part Katana Zero's laboratory of nastiness is built around a few simple tools. Molotov cocktail and knock back incoming bullets. Out of the mine cart and use it as a shield against the laser grid. Open the door and slice two guys to pieces. Katana Zero gives you a bit more to play with, of course. He's done it over and over to make it look that easy. He walks across the road and starts counting. There's Bill Murray stood on the street corner. The thing that Katana Zero really shares with Hotline Miami, over and above the publisher, the super-violence, the story of drug-addled killers, the glitchy way reality seems to be a corrupted save file, and the enduring love of lurid, hangover pinks? The thing it really shares is the awareness that a certain kind of punishing and precise action game is always itching to turn into the robbery scene from Groundhog Day. Stylish and punishing, this is a darkly compelling treat.
0 kommentar(er)
