I've always appreciated Slave Zero for the exact reasons most people at the time of it's release disliked the game. At it's core, Slave Zero is an unapologetic straightforward action game who's main focus is action over everything else. The level designs are mostly straightforward corridors filled with baddies to destroy with only the slightest hints of exploration added. The corridors usually open up into larger areas that act as rooms just to destroy more enemies.
With a few exceptions, being missions that have specific objectives, the game mainly consists of starting at point A, destroying everything there, then continuing through corridors while destroying enemies, to get to point B where you destroy all the enemies there. The sense of scale in the game is impressive, as Slave Zero is a 60 foot tall mech that towers above buildings, and most enemies, and the concept and art direction hit on two things I am a sucker for: blowing stuff up in a giant mech, and a cyper-punk/Blade Runner style atmosphere. The combat in the game is excellent. Unlike the average mech title, Slave Zero is incredibly agile. He moves fast, jumps high, and the gunplay which consists of switching between two weapon types, ballistic and energy, while strafing, and also hitting enemies with rockets.
I love the feel of the combat in this game. There's something to be said about taking on waves of enemies while juking and jiving around their rockets, and forcing them to eat yours instead. The movement and aiming feels really good in this game, despite the Dreamcasts' single analog stick and some major framerate issues in the Dreamcast port of the game that really do put a damper on the combat in the later levels of the game.
Slave Zero was released on the Dreamcast around a month after the system hit, and is a first generation game with some poor first generation optimization. People who really want to play this game should check out the PC version on GoG. It is also available on Steam, but in order to get the Steam version to run, you'll have to find all the fixes (which users have posted in the game's discussion section) yourself to get it to run right on a windows 10 or newer system. I really wish Steam would force some kind of compatibility on older games like this.
I've never played the PC original, so my only experience is the Dreamcast version. PC gamers speak highly of an infamous PC gamer demo of the game, I, however, was not a PC gamer until much later, so my first exposure to the game was a review of the game in an issue of Gamepro magazine which first piqued my interest in this game. I can't find the issue they reviewed the game in, but off memory, I want to say they gave the game a four out of five, but don't quote me on that one. Sure enough, I hunted down the issue in an online archive to save myself the time of digging through multiple tubs, and they did give it a 4 out of 5. I can't remember the name of someone who just told me their name, but I can sure remember a gamepro review from over two decades ago.
The Dreamcast version of the game, despite it's major framerate issues in some areas of the game, is still a game I have always enjoyed for what it offers. It's simple, yet action packed. A lot of the reviews at the time bashed it for being a shallow, action-focused title, but that's really the beauty of Slave Zero, unapologetically, this is a shallow action game that tosses deeper level designs or gameplay concepts to the side to excel at the action elements.
The beauty is, not every game has to be a deep ordeal. Sometimes you just want to jump into a 60-foot mech and start blowing stuff up for instant gratification, no thinking required. I have always appreciated the straight-up action focus of the game, the beautiful simplicity and the fun of the gunfights. Slave Zero isn't trying to be Half-Life, or even Shogo, it's trying to excel at action and atmosphere, and that's what I've always really liked about the game. It's not for everyone, especially not the Dreamcast port, but those who can appreciate a straight up action game will find enjoyment out of this game.
Five Hundred years in the future, the SovKahn rules the corporate Dynasty over the mega city S1-9 with an iron fist. A small band of rebels filled with the descendants of an ancient warrior clan who have dubbed themselves the Guradians have managed to get their hands on a single Slave unit, giant mechs grown from embryos and fused with dark matter, and chosen one of their own, Chan, to permanently fuse with Slave Zero and fight his way through fifteen levels, defeating the Sovkahn, and his minions of evil Slave mechs. The story isn't particularly deep, but it is told through cutscenes throughout the game, most of which are just a means of giving players the level objectives.
I may have oversimplified the design earlier when I said it was just run, shoot, run, because there are occasional mission objectives thrown in, like having to protect the rebel base from attackers, protect embryos from attackers long enough for the rebels to steal them and my personal least favorite, one convoy mission where you have to protect a convoy of ships while traversing the sewers. Failing to protect any of these ends with an instant game over. Luckily, the game isn't one that kicks you back to the title screen when you fail, it just reloads the last checkpoint which is at the last area loaded, so you only have to replay each section from the start at game over.
The game doesn't allow you to save anywhere, but it does let you save a the beginning of each section. My suggestion is to have at least two rotating saves in the game, alternating which one you save for each section in case you accidentally save yourself into a corner. If you barely scrape by in one portion of the level, you start the next section with the exact same amount of life, and the exact weapons you had. This can lead to you starting the next section with one hit, and sometimes you start out an area with a couple of enemies firing at you to start, or you took a downgraded weapon into the next area, and the tougher enemies require the upgraded weapons to do more damage.
After repeated failures at the level it is sometimes advisable to reload the previous section, and play it more carefully, and pick up either the upgraded weapons, or the downgraded weapons that could be more useful in the situation, like the rail gun instead of the lightning gun upgrade.
Not running two saves caught up to me pretty hard when first playing through this footage when I finally hit mission 12 where I foolishly stuck with a machine gun instead of the single shot explosive cannon. In this mission you have to protect an embryo from enemies trying to destroy it as your allies fly in and pick it up off a train. I was playing on normal difficulty, but even then the enemies were bullet sponges by this time in the game. This room features the worst framerate issues in the Dreamcast port. Normally the framerate issues don't make it hard to aim, but this one spot in the twelfth mission is the exception.
The framerate got so choppy, and the machine gun I was using to take down the sponges wasn't getting the job done by a long shot. I was about to give up on the normal difficulty and restart the game on easy, because, back in the day, a lot of PC to console ports were straight ports when it came to difficulty. A game that is easy using a Mouse and keyboard, is quite a bit more difficult using a controller with little to no aim assist in the game.
The framerate would drop down to a slideshow in this room. Before I chose to start over from the beginning on easy difficulty, I decided to check my other VMUs for my old save from almost two decades ago, and sure enough I was also stuck on Mission 12 in that save, but I did run two saves on my old game. In this save, I had the rocket launcher upgrade, and the lightning gun, and I managed to beat this room in my first try. Just changing the weapons helped me succeed. This is why it is important to run at least two saves in the game in case you need to go back to the previous level and collect different weapons, or start with more life.
The game's framerate issues and sometimes insta-fail missions are really the two bigget complaints I can wage against it. Generally, I can play an old console game that has framerate issues no problem, and for the most part, the framerate in Salve Zero wasn't an issues except in a couple of areas. I will say that this footage looks worse watching than when playing. The later levels in the game have some major framerate issues, yet I was able to play through them just fine. This might not be the case for others, but years of playing N64 games means I can handle choppiness pretty well.
However, the framerate issues are why I can't suggest the Dreamcast port to most people out there. If you are the type of person who can tough through choppiness, you might enjoy the Dreamcast version if you find it for cheap. For everyone else, there is the PC version, which actually has background music, and is cheaper in every form, even picking up the physical PC disk is cheaper than the average asking price for the Dreamcast version, so even if you don't trust digital games, you can still find the PC version cheaper physically.
Graphically, I've always loved the atmosphere in this game. I am a sucker for blade-runner aesthetics, that dark tech-noir visual style in huge futuristic cityscapes is always appealing to me as is the scale and size of being in a giant robot blowing stuff up in a living, breathing city. The whole look of the graphics in the game takes me back to my early PC gaming days.
I was relatively late to PC gaming outside of playing a couple of games on my dad's PC (Alien vs Predator) when I was nineteen or twenty years old, someone gave me a hand-me down HP Office computer with a 533mhz Pentium 3, 512kb of ram, Maybe DDR, I can't fully remember, and it had an AGP slot. I didn't really understand the big hype of graphics cards. The few PC games I owned either prior looked great to me as far as I was concerned.
However, on my birthday one year, I was at walmart with my brother, and there on a shelf was an ATI Radeon 9000 graphics card. Yes, there was a time in which you could buy GPU's at Walmart. My bro picked it up for me for my birthday, and it wasn't until I finally booted up Shogo (which was a $10 game that came with Septera Core in a double pack), and finally saw the game running at high resolution with texture filtering, either bilinear, or trilinear filtering that I finally understood what the fuss about graphics cards was.
Slave Zero reminds me of that entire era of PC games. It's graphical details and art direction look great for the Dreamcast, even if the framerate has issues, but the whole look of the game is a nostalgic throwback to PC games in the mid to late 90's. I take one look at this game, and I just think Voodoo 2, even if I never owned an actual Voodoo 2 card. If you want some alternative examples of what PC games of that era looked like aside from Quake or Unreal, look at games like Slave Zero. The game just has that nostalgic look of PC games of that era. Just the visual look of the game is nostalgic to me. Obviously, the major framerate issues of this console mar the graphical presentation overall, but I still love the look and atmosphere in Slave Zero.
The controls actually feel pretty good to use if you are either used to other Dreamcast shooters, or used to N64 first person shooters. By default, you use the face buttons to move, and the analog stick to aim, but it feels a lot more accurate to me using the Dreamcast analog stick than the N64's. The aiming is by default inverted aim, which doesn't bother me, because I still play inverted. It also shouldn't be a big deal N64 shooter vets. There are other control schemes you can pick from that might change the aiming if you cannot handle inverted, but I didn't test any of them for this review.
Overall, the controls feel pretty good, and I was able to hit more accurate rail shots in this game than I am in Quake III on the Dreamcast using the controller. It does take a bit of getting used to press up on the D-pad to jump in the game, but I didn't have a lot of problems hitting the jumps in the platforming elements in this game. I found myself adjusting to it. You also have to hold left on the D-pad and pull the right trigger to change your weapon, or hold right on the d-pad and pull the left trigger and wait for your crosshair to turn red to do things like pick up a different gun, or pick up a tiny human, and pressing the combination again to then throw that human as they make a satisfying red splatter on the wall.
Overall, the controls feel great when aiming and moving, with the only hitches being the inverted controls for some, the awkwardness of having to hold a d-pad button and press another button to do things like change your weapon, and there are times where switching from your ballistic weapon to your energy weapon will cause a glitch where Slave Zero will make the animation like he changed the weapon, but you won't be able to fire the weapon, because for some reason, he grabbed nothing. You have to change the weapon once more until he pulls out the proper weapon. This can sometimes get you killed. There are also some other weird glitches like getting stuck on walls, or jumping up into walls that rear their heads, but I was always able to wriggle out of them. It's just annoying when you get stuck there, unable to move for a bit.
From a sound perspective, the effects are well done, even if sometimes the sound of shooting is cut out, the voice acting is decently done, but the Dreamcast port doesn't have the background music that is present in the PC version. It has a silent ambiance to it which makes it feel more atmospheric, but having the same tunes as the PC version would have been nice. I don't know if was laziness on the developer's part, or deadline issues, but the only music in the game is in the opening, and ending credits. Unfortunately, the rest of the music in the game was cut.
The Bottom Line: Even though I have always thoroughly enjoyed Slave Zero on the Dreamcast, with it's technical issues and the fact that the Dreamcast version is more expensive than the PC version in digital and physical form, I can't suggest the Dreamcast version of Slave Zero to everyone. If you are collecting specifically for the Dreamcast, or have nostalgia specifically for the Dreamcast version of the game, then it's worth picking up for cheap.
For everyone else, check out the PC version of the game. It's simple, straight up fun. Even the Dreamcast version is fun to play despite it's issues. It's visuals and gameplay are a nostalgic throwback to late 90's PC gaming or early Dreamcast gaming, and overall it's an enjoyable experience. Some people loved this game, other people hated this game, but I've always had fun with it every time I've put the disk into my dreamcast. If you're looking for a game you can jump into, and enjoy without a lot of deep thought required, then Slave Zero is a fantastic choice.
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