Slave Zero X - Playthrough Part 1 (2024)

Slave Zero X is a 2D hack and slash game. You play as Shou - a warrior who steals a biomecha labelled X on his quest to kill the dictator of this world SovKhan. They fuse together similar to something like Venom and start their bloody path. These actions are in rebellion to Shou's master, whose group is called The Guardians. Things were going OK until one of SovKhan's lieutenants Atavaka appears and kicks your ass. He's then contacted by the other 4 distracting him long enough so that Shou gets a chance to escape. You then get a flashback of Shou talking to his fellow Guardian Isamu, who he's likely trying to avenge.

The combat system in this game is incredibly stiff and grounded. I expected simple beat 'em up mechanics, but instead the people who made this game tried to re-invent the wheel and failed miserably. It's hard to convey what's wrong with the combo system just by watching it, but I'll try to explain it. You have standard light-light-heavy combos, but after a heavy hit of any sort your character freezes and you can't continue your sting with anything else. That is except EX moves, which are modified versions of the heavy attacks. How do you make EX moves? Well, you have to press light and then heavy attack in really quick succession, so you can never be sure whether you will do light-light-heavy or light-EX combo in the heat of battle. The problem is you really need those if you are to extend your combos and deal decent damage to the stronger foes. Another problem is that EX moves unsurprisingly require energy - about a quarter of your bar to be precise. So if you waste some of that you are in trouble. The only decent workaround is the Fatal Sync mechanic. When you have full energy meter you activate this install for a time, which allows you to use EX moves for free for a limited time and you fill your health as you damage enemies, which is the only healing mechanic in the game - no chickens in objects or anything similar. Now, the problem with that is that is that you have to suffer until you have full energy. A partial solution is the burst, which you can hit an enemy with to fill your energy immediately. The burst recharges with time, so you can use it, activate Fatal Sync and by the time that finishes, use burst again giving you a nice loop. There is a problem here too though - if you are hit while activating the burst you will break out of the enemy combo, but your energy will not be filled meaning that you don't get your Fatal Sync.

Another problem is the defensive mechanics. You have a dash, but it's range is pathetic and you don't even get an invincibility frame in there making it next to useless. There is no block in the game. You can counter enemy attacks by pressing forward at the exact moment the attack is about to hit you, which is ass, because you are usually in a middle of a combo and are pressing different directional buttons to bring out a different heavy/EX move. You don't notice it as much when fighting the regular enemies, but the heavier ones and the mini-bosses sometimes have projectiles which you can't avoid in any other way. You do have a double jump, but it's incredibly slow and absolutely useless in combat aside from helping to juggle enemies, which are already in a combo.

Speaking of the mini-bosses, they are a pain to fight. They have armour, meaning that your attacks can't combo them and they are not even staggered. This leads to the above problem of them executing their attack while you are hitting them and you have to prey to hit the correct timing to counter in the middle of your own combo. At some point you break their shields and can juggle them, but if they fall to the ground you are sh*t out of luck because you don't have any attacks to hit grounded enemies, so you have to wait for them to stand up, wasting your Fatal Sync. After barely defeating a couple mini-bosses I had to stop because my hands started to hurt from constantly fighting with the controls.