A fast paced arcadey third person shooter from simpler times

Slave Zero is a 1999 fast paced third person shooter with very linear levels, simple gameplay, a short run time and a fair amount of technical problems. If you turn off your brain and don't expect much from it, it's a nice 4 or 5 hours romp through a futuristic city infested with biomechs.

Final Rating: Flawed but enjoyable

Story

As you'd expect from a old school, arcadey game, the story is told through a text dump at the beginning and dialogues throughout the campaign - which would be fine if you could actually hear what they're saying: there are no subtitles, and poor audio mixing means that music and SFX will often drown out whatever the characters are trying to say. Worse, some lines will get dropped mid-sentence. But whatever, it's not like we're here for the story anyway.

To sum it up, there's an evil ruler producing evil giant robots to rule the world, and you're the Resistance's only hope. That's pretty much it.

Gameplay

The simplicity of Slave Zero is obvious from its control scheme: you can move, jump and shoot.

You've also have the worst stomp I've ever seen: it's low, weak, effects a smaller area than the visual effects suggest and locks you in place for some 3 or 4 seconds, which is usually enough to get you killed in later levels. You'll probably use it once or twice and forget about it as well. You can also melee enemies if you get close to them and press the primary Fire button, but again, it's complete garbage so you'll never use it. Finally, some objects you destroy in the scenary will leave a girder, which you can pick and throw, but again, it's slow and weak and never really worth. Why are there some many useless gameplay options in this game? That's old school gaming for you.

The weaponry is limited to 3 types: a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, and two switchable weapons: one energy-based, another projectile based, and you'll always carry exactly one of each. They have a limited amount of ammo: 300 projectiles, 100 energy, 50 missiles, and that will generally be the main factor in choosing which to use, since there aren't any other systems to motivate careful usage of weapons. The coreprinciple here is clear: damage is damage, so keep shooting.

There are no upgrades whatsoever, though throughout the game you'll find multiple new weapons, which the game claims are "upgrades", even though sometimes they are worse than their previous counterpart - but at least you're able to change them after, if you so desire.

Enemies aren't particularly challenging, and generally will just move around and shoot you a bit. Some have shields so you have to get behind them, and will dodge your missiles so you're forced to use your main weapon, some are more tanky and some will have attacks that push you - a specially dangerous attack when paired with bottomless insta-death pits.

Yet simple jumping side-stepping and jumping will keep you out of harm's way for most of the game. You also move slowly when going backwards, and fastest when going sideways or diagonally. The principle, then, is to keep moving and shooting, at all times.

The game offers 3 difficulty options (Easy, Normal, Hard), and it was a pretty easy breezy ride, even when playing on hard - except for the last levels, where a massive difficulty spike happens. Enemies start using guided missiles with incredible tracking that do 180 degrees turns and hit you behind corners, forcing you to snipe them from afar while hiding and peeking from behind a wall. Bosses also become massive bullet sponges - this is particularly true of the last boss: if you don't maximize your damage per ammo unit, you'll end up without any, with no restocking options available. I had to restart the fight a few times, at one point even backtracked the whole level to find the energy weapon with best ammo-to-damage conversion so I didn't run dry during the boss. Not exactly the kind of climax I was expecting, but oh well.

Level Design

The game has 14 missions, each split into 3 parts that can be completed in 5 to 10 minutes, or even less if you ignore all enemies and just rush to the end.

The levels are pretty straightforward corridor shooters, barely having any branching at all - very rarely a map will offer two routes and offer a new gun in the optional one, but in general, you just press forward and kill everything in sight, then maybe face a boss before proceeding to the next mission.

They're also surprisingly vertical, offering a decent amount of platforming, and also suffering some of the worse sins from the genre: having fall damage (in a mech game? Seriously?) and many instant-death bottomless pits, specially in later levels - likely the biggest source of player deaths.

Although your character can grab ledges and the map offers plenty of them, you'll find that trying to explore won't lead you to any secrets: instead, you'll most likely get thrown out-of-bounds, die and have to restart the level. You'll soon learn not to stray from the obvious path.

The small maps with low amounts of details and a grey futuristic city aesthetic make for a visually unimpressive game, to say the least, even when accounting for its 25 years of age. Occasionally you'll be thrown in some green or blue sewers for variety, but don't expect much eye candy from this game - or any at all.

Also worthy of noting is that dying restarts from you from the beginning of the level, which isn't that bad since levels are pretty short, and you can also save anywhere. However, there is no auto-save, so as the saying go, "Save early, save often, save in different slots".

Technical Aspects

To keep it simple: it's a mess, but it's playable.

Steam's version (the one I played) comes with nglide, which is mostly stable but removes almost all lighting from the game, making the already-plain game looks even worse. Worse, playing at resolutions greater than 960 x 720 breaks the missile lock-on system and creates an offset in the aiming reticule, making it inaccurate. There is a Direct3D fan patch that fixes the lighting, but it also has its downsides, like making the game having a window border at all times, even if set to "fullscreen". Some effects, like some explosions and lightning, also dropped FPS to single digits.

Aside from the rendering and performance issues, there are also a few more serious bugs: twice during my playthrough I got stuck on the map geometry, and twice some objectives became impossible to complete. These would be more aggravating it the levels weren't short or if you couldn't save anywhere.

But other than that, the game is completely playable and runs somewhat fine.

Conclusion

As a mecha fan, I was a bit disappointed with how much it doesn't feel like one: the small, cramped maps with low amount of details and enemies generally being the same size as you don't sell the giant robot fantasy at all.

However, it still was a fun third person shooter, and when once you get into the game's flow, weaving between shots, dispensing missiles and raining bullets against multiple enemies all at once, it just feels good. If you don't mind the jank and age, and appreciate the simpleness of it all, then do give Slave Zero a go.

As a final note, I'd like to mention that this game features one of the biggest "Fuck You" weapon in gaming, effectively giving you a rapid-fire pinpoint nuclear weapon that has a surprising amount of ammo. Which you'd think would make the game trivially easy, but given how little ammo and how strong the enemies are in the last stage, it's still far harder than the game's average.

A short doom-like with metroidvania. You'll shoot, jump, double-jump, dash, become a fetus to go into small crevices, collect new abilities and upgrade existing ones, fight bosses, absorb fetus essences to heal yourself and fight a bunch of grotesque enemies, do one or two side-quests for NPCs, go back to find upgrades, lose yourself then find the way forward by happenstance, and after a short while the game is over.

The art is pretty interesting (specially if you're into body horror-esque art) and movement is done well, and with a little clever usage of your skills you can even break sequence - by doing an Air Dash from a side cliff, I was able to access the snow map right after the mushroom map (normally you'd need the double jump), allowing me to get the shotgun secondary fire before I even had the shotgun itself! There are even some "secret techniques", like firing downward with the Sawed-Off (which propels you backwards whenever you fire) to increase your jump height - thought I don't remember ever needing it, even for secrets.

On the other hand, the combat was pretty bare bones - the game only has 4 weapons, with one being a melee weapon and another being a secret one, and none of them are particularly cool. The enemies are also pretty basic and have very little animation, like 3 or 4 frames, and either run at you or stay still and shoot at you, meaning side-strafing or running backwards is all you need to do to avoid getting hit. Another downside is that the map, while good for location yourself, is not particularly good for exploration, making it hard to back-track for items. The fact it can't be marked or annotated is also a downside. The story tries to be a bit different, at least thematically, but the writing ends up being a bit amateurish and feeling a bit too trope-y and edgy towards the ending. Not terrible, but not particularly good either.

Using GZDoom as an engine is also a double-edged sword: while it provides a stable, optimized engine, it also offers a seemingly infinite amount of configuration options that are hard to make sense, some left-over UI and commands that had me scratching my head on how to use or why it wasn't working, as well as hidden commands that apparently weren't listed in the settings, like pressing P to change the map's textures.

All in all, an okay retro FPS that mixes genres a bit and doesn't overstay its welcome, yet devoid of any particularly interesting mechanics or moments that will make you remember it years after playing.

Memorable moments: going into the abyss, where there is no map and you can't see shit. It would have been a great level if the flashlight mechanic - a flying light-emitting mandrake-like that follows you - didn't get stuck or left behind every other corner, leaving you in complete darkness 80% of the time. At least there's sort of a workaround: turn into a fetus and the mandrake will remain above you at all times - thought this leaves you completely vulnerable.