Slave Zero X Thoughts and Rant

I really wanted to enjoy Slave Zero X, call it a lesser known game of 2024 and say, "you should check this out if you like beat em ups of any kind" but I can't. I've seen many reviews particularly on Steam where they criticized the game as hardcore Devil May Cry and Guilty Gear fans but I'm going to try to approach this review as someone who has played a number of action games and games as a whole over the years.

There is so much wrong with the game and there is SOME moments of fun to be had so much of the game's combat mechanics feel inept, the way they are presented to you is poorly done, the campaign is structure is just lacking and the game as a whole is super unstable.

Slave Zero X on consoles and PC as of now seems to run really poorly. On PS5, I encountered very frequent crashing on Zone 2 where you fight the flame sword mini boss for the first time, got 2 infinite load screens of death and also a crash where the game showed some kind of error could of it's own and then I got booted out of the game. The game has been out for months and it still hasn't gotten patched enough where the game feels like a stable experience.

With that out of the way, there's other issues with Slave Zero X outside of how unstable it is, first of all the tutorial really sucks, it is so amateurish, you don't even get a tutorial where you play out the moves and learn them as you go, instead the game just has a bunch of screens telling you what each button and what each mechanic does and gives you barely much of an understanding how combat works. Here's an idea to fix this, Shou and Isamu are friends so why not put them in a sparring match teaching the player how the combat mechanics work? This seems to be a decent way to teach the player how to engage with it's combat mechanics.

Here's another big issue with Slave Zero X, it's a game inspired by fighting games and Devil May Cry and guess what? You have no move list by pressing the start menu. I'm not the kind of guy who looks into a move list but considering there's attacks I would probably want to know like the Burst EX move, I won't know unless I look it up online.

The checkpoint system is also very inconsistent, I'm already against any game adopting the NES and Arcade philosophy of redoing lots of content upon death but Slave Zero X is very inconsistent regarding this. Some levels have checkpoints while others don't. Some parts of the game checkpoints on the bosses and other parts of the game have you fight waves of enemies before you can fight the mini bosses again, and mini bosses and destroy your health bar pretty quickly. The amount of enemy waves you have to fight before getting to the hard part just makes me feel like the game is wasting my time before the game is getting me to the part that is causing me to get the game overs.

You also never get any new weapons, moves or abilties throughout the whole game, which can make the game feel more monotonous since getting new abilities and or something new is the exciting part of single player action games of any kind, yet Slave Zero just gives you the same toolset the whole game. Which now leads me to my next point.

The mini bosses are a pain in the ass, and they have ridiculous amounts of HP while you die very quickly by them and dispatching many of them pretty much revolves around the same thing: getting lucky. New weapons and abilties could possibly make you more proficient at killing them but killing them revolves around the same tactics, spam ordenace on smaller groups and hopefully hit them and the mini boss at the same time, and hope you can keep wailing on the mini boss as their shield are down so you don't have to fight them. The hammer user mini boss deserves a special reward for being one of the most annoying enemies in a game I have ever fought, he has a grabbing fetish, and there is no way to actively avoid his grab attacks. You can't attack him to stop, you can't dodge out the grab and jumping is too unreliable.

The kicker to all this and this is what made me quit the game is that you have to fight these mini bosses while seemingly infinitely respawning hitscanners are attacking you towards the end of the game. So if the mini bosses aren't eating away large chunks of health, the hitscanners will slowly cut away at your health.

There is also the fact that you get no inviciblity frames upon getting hit which means regular mobs can kill you by juggling you to death. Dodging I'm not sure gives you consistent I frame either.

With all this said, there is an interesting concept here. The idea of playing a beat em up where juggling and crowd control is the name of the game is a cool if even innovating but due to the reasons I mentioned, it feels like a half baked idea. It's trying to beat a beat em up and a fighting game and isn't that great at it.

Overall, Slave Zero X was something I waned to enjoy but there are so many other 2D beat em ups from this era alone you could be playing instead.