Slave Zero X

Originally posted on 2024-03-13

Fun as hell and just as terrible

It took 5 minutes of training mode practice in Slave Zero X before I knew I loved the game. It took 5 hours of playing the main campaign before I knew I hated the game. 25 hours in and I still (love . hate) it. I'm not going to write a structured review on this game; I'm just ranting about the things I feel passionately about.

BORN TO SLASH

Slave Zero X exhibits a deep understanding of the most engaging combat mechanics found in 2D anime fighting games like Guilty Gear and BlazBlue as well as the core fun of character action games like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, or Darksiders. You can jump cancel your grounded normals. You can jump cancel your air normals. You can jump cancel and reset your air jump with divekicks. You can EX cancel almost anything and normal cancel many of those EX moves for free. You can "roman" cancel anything. You can dash cancel your normals for free and your specials for meter. You can do infinites with a normal chain as simple as:

5LL. jc. j5Lj2L

on repeat. But you can make it look a lot spicier by doing:

5L6H4L. jc. j5Lj2L

on repeat instead! Labbing these routes and finding new ones is so pure and fun. It takes the strict limitations of traditional fighting games and gives you a small taste of what cancelling almost everything can do to combo routes. Dishing out high damage with Pulse Sync and endless EX cancels is the definition of a power fantasy, but I find the most interesting routes to be restricted to normals and regular specials with interesting cancel opportunities; EX cancels allow for large pickup windows that remove the challenge and interest in finding tight links or challenging sequences.

I've really had a blast labbing this game and playing through it. I hold the #1 score rank for the first 5 or so levels on GOG at the time of this writing and am top 3 on the "Crimson Citadel" scoreboard - I "get" how to play the game.

DOOMED TO ROT

I refuse to believe the developers of the game played each level of this game and thought "yeah, this is fun" would be an accurate summary of the experience they had. There are only three possible explanations I can come up with for why playing the campaign is so miserable:

1 - There wasn't enough time to dedicate to encounter design or enemy systems after crafting such a deep player character and making the impressive art assets

2 - The developers in charge of encounter design and enemy systems have no idea what makes the popular games in this genre fun.

3 - This is meant to be a "bro the game is so hard xddd" experience that only contrarians or masochists pretend to like

I'd be surprised if the first point isn't what happened here. Almost everything but the character you play is deeply flawed or completely nonsensical.

• The combo counting system encourages you to repeat the exact same attacks on loop in ways that keep most enemies grounded so that you can divekick or j2(L,H) them to keep the counter going. The combo counter only lasts as long as your hitstun and while you can juggle dead enemies, they don't freeze or reset the combo counter. This is a huge oversight; juggling dead enemies shouldn't give extra combo score, but it feels intuitive that it would reset the timer for the amount of hitstun dealt to the corpse (if not a bit extra). Overall, the system disincentivizes unique or cool combos in a way that is directly at odds with the game's core themes.

• The game allows enemies to juggle you, sometimes from 100-0. You know what the absolute worst part of normal fighting games is? Getting comboed by your opponent for long periods. It just doesn't belong in a singleplayer game; increase the damage that enemies do if you need to, but don't let them combo the player except in very special circumstances such as a (non-repeating) boss.

• Your only defensive options are a dodge, a 3rd Strike parry (press towards enemy with precise timing during the opening active frames of their attack) or a Guilty Gear style burst. Dodging has enormous recovery and will get you punished if used as anything but a combo extender. The parry is nearly impossible to rely on due to how tight the timing is and how poorly telegraphed many enemy attacks are. Burst isn't a viable defensive option as it needs to be used to get Fatal Sync back constantly; even if burst wasn't required for Fatal Sync loops it doesn't work against armored enemies because ???. I would have loved a regular block option that costs meter or something similar.

• The "style" portion of level scoring is a mystery. It seems like it might be related to taking little to no damage, but it's not one hundred percent clear. Your combo counter affecting scoring so heavily makes the questionable combo counter design more frustrating.

• The drones. Not only are the drones completely $(EVERY_HORRIBLE_INSULT_IMAGINABLE) from a fundamental game design perspective, but they also crash my game constantly in Crimson Citadel. To be clear, the way to fix this is not to identify whatever is going on with the code that causes the crash. The way to fix this is by removing the drones entirely.

• The training room is super bare bones. The fact that it exists at all is great (I would've refunded the game if it didn't) but the options for actually using it are bad. You get one enemy that you can't toggle the health on for in a small room that isn't representative of the areas you usually play in. The enemy can't even have their AI toggled on, but you can toggle on walking forward OR standing still and attacking. What???

• All enemies without super armor are pure fodder and have very little to differentiate them besides their sprites. Some have unique attacks, but they don't affect how you play at all. This would be fine if they had smarter pathing and their attacks occupied significantly different parts of the screen to encourage movement.

• All enemies with super armor are annoying because they have super armor. This encourages spamming the "DP" (8[L,H]) for invincibility frames once enemies start stacking and you can't see their individual animations. There are a dozen ways this could've been done better - one example would be a blocking/structure system found in other melee games.

A RIVAL'S TRIUMPH

There is another excellent game in this genre of arena combo games called Defect Process - yes, "Defect" goes to the Steam page and "Process" is a GitHub link! The enemies are far dumber in Defect Process in that most will walk wall-to-wall until you wander into their fighting distance while they are facing you, but each one has a unique role in pressuring your spacing. Enemies have widely varying attack distances: some will fly and fire projectiles towards you, some occupy standard melee distances, some are rooted turrets firing laser beams, and some throw javelins across the arena which you can jump on and ride.

You have to clear each fighting arena while dodging attacks that all occupy different parts of the screen which keeps you moving on both the X and Y axis constantly. You don't have any standard defensive options because you don't need them; super armor is used very sparingly and is appropriately fitted to enemies with generously telegraphed attacks. As a result, you are meant to leverage movement options to navigate the room and enemy attacks like solving a puzzle. Defect Process doesn't have half the style that Slave Zero X does, but it's proof positive that an indie developer can understand how to take a game idea and flesh out compelling challenges in the limitations they design.

(5LL 62H 268)'s RAGE

I love Slave Zero X. I hate Slave Zero X. I hope to play games inspired by, but without many of the mistakes made by, Slave Zero X.