Katana zero physical
Then the more I played the game, the more I enjoyed the combat (as I was getting better at doing smooth dodge-rolls). It’s the usual cyberpunk plot of government conspiracies, reality-bending drugs and the search for identity. The beginning was too wordy, and the combat wasn’t meaty enough. When I first laid my hands on the game, I was slightly taken aback. On the whole, this game is technically and artistically on point the game runs well with practically non-existent loading times, while the pixel-art on display is beautifully enhanced with detailed animations and pretty lighting effects.įinally, I need to mention the story. While both support rebindable keys, the basic layout provided by the game was actually perfect for me, and it is pure joy to control our swordsman. I tried both with mouse & keyboard and with a controller. I loved those fights, as they combined pattern learning with the necessity for quick reflexes (or you can use slow-mo). Instead of giving the player new powers, variety comes from additional phases (such as a motorbike fight) and the occasional boss fights that push the player’s abilities to their limits. However, the base formula does not evolve too much. From then on, there are more and more screens with a high density of gunmen that need to be dispatched with… subtlety.
In terms of overall difficulty, it’s easy until about half-way of its four hour runtime. There are plenty of checkpoints, you never have to restart far from where you died. Thus, I can say that the powers wielded by our swordsman can appeal to both hardcore players who breeze through the levels as well as the rest of the audience who can take advantage of slow-mo to decimate the opposition. Once I had mastered it, I finally started enjoying my time in the game. It was much more difficult, but it was still possible thanks to that dodge-roll move. Then, I decided to play the game the way I preferred, by doing my best not to rely on slow-mo to succeed. I ended up disliking the game because of that, since many enemies are simply too fast to dispatch before they shoot in real-time. I feel the same about the slow-mo moments: I don’t want to wait for the door to open, for the bullet to come in range and so on, I want to DO something NOW, not wait. These replays of the levels can be canceled quickly, but it’s still a few extra seconds of downtime. My twitch fingers were ready for fast-paced action, and yet there were these moments when I was just frustratingly waiting for the game to let me move again. Contrary to what I anticipated, I actually hated the time-stopping ability, for the same reason that I hated the possibility to watch a black and white recording of a successful level upon completion: it halted the flow.
These two methods of fighting allow the game to please several types of players, and I will explain why. The other one is the ability to slow time down to a crawl, which is perfect to deflect a bullet and return it back to the sender. One is a dodge-roll with invincibility frames. As we have recently seen with APE OUT, melee-focused characters need a little extra push to survive against enemy gunmen. Apart from slashes, our hero can also occasionally pick up some items and throw them, such as hatchets, Molotov cocktails or smoke grenades. A bright light followed by blood gushing out and painting the walls: it feels amazing, especially when there is such a blood-pumping electronic soundtrack.
Strangely, his psychiatrist sends him on various contracts that relate to a particularly potent kind of drug, the kind that allows you to stop and rewind time.Īs expected, the combat is fast-paced and meaty, as our slashes instantly kill the poor gangsters that dare exist in between our sword and the objective. Katana ZERO puts you in the shoes of a mysterious swordsman suffering from terrible nightmares.