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Devolver DigitalĪnd that wouldn’t have bothered me much.
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Aside from a level that integrates a chase scene with a fun (and much less punishing) throwback to the vehicle sections of Battletoads, the story never engaged me at all. Katana Zero sticks it all in an extremely pretty pixel art game with the now-familiar “graphical glitches represent crumbling sanity” trick, which even casual gamers will recognize as worn out. It’s more than gratifying enough to get you through to the next bit of story, where the game slows to a crawl to deliver a bit of exposition on a supersoldier-altered perception-amnesia-government conspiracy plot that’s been cobbled together from a handful of very recognizable tropes. Get the timing down, and you can start flinging bullets back at bad guys Jedi-style without even needing to use slo-mo. When you’ve got a handle on the movement mechanics, enemy types, and geography, combat can flow smoothly from one section to the next. The game excels in its midsection, like a yoga instructor with a crippling addiction to situps. You can slash in any direction, with a bit of momentum to add to the platforming, and a handful of additional items like remote bombs, smoke grenades, and throwing knives mix things up with a single use.
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That slow-motion mechanic can get you out of a scrape or two, but if you’re overwhelmed, you’ll soon find yourself low on psychedelic drugs and heavy on unwanted ventilation. A highlight is the ability to deflect bullets back at shooters, which is tough in real-time but easy in slo-mo. When you’re in the thick of it, the combat feels good. And if you don’t, a re-do is just a second or two away. After a couple of missions, nearly every room has combinations of enemies that mostly require a careful plan and some serious twitch skills to get through. There are only a handful of enemy types-your standard bruiser, slasher, rifleman, shotgunner, shield dude-but each one requires a different approach. It has that instant respawn mechanic popularized by Hotline Miami and Super Meat Boy, and the dodge-roll-bounce-strike feel that a lot of side-scrolling, combat-focused games do. One hit kills the baddies, and one hit (from guns, swords, fists, etc.) also kills you. Also, there’s some slice of life stuff before and after every mission-prepare for strangely insistent button prompts to drink herbal tea.Įach stage is a set of interconnected rooms, wherein you must kill each bad guy to progress.
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Now he assassinates people at the whim of a shadowy organization that orders him around via his psychiatrist-slash-drug enabler. In gameplay terms: you can instantly redo a level because you’re just “planning it out” until you win, and also, there’s a slow-motion meter. I am less so, so I’ll spoil the setup for you: he’s a former soldier who was experimented on with some crazy perception-altering drugs, so now he has both precognition and enhanced reflexes. The game is incredibly pleased with itself in terms of the story. Katana Zero is a side-scrolling, hyper-fast 2D action game. (It’s also available on the PC.) And based on that description, I got exactly what I was expecting…up until about the last third of the game. So with my opinion brazenly written on my sleeve, let’s talk about Katana Zero.īeing vaguely aware of the game as a member of the ultra-fast, ultra-violent, ultra-pixelated school attended by titles like Hotline Miami and Dead Cells, I picked it up on sale for the Switch.