The final boss in particular is an immensely satisfying duel against a better-equipped opponent who refuses to play fair, calling on you to master your limited tools to win.Īlthough I had a blast with Katana Zero the first time around, it definitely lacks replayability. Just like the rest of the levels, your final victory against a boss may take a minute or less in real time, but that comes at the end of much more time spent trying and retrying, testing and adjusting, warping the flow of time until you know your enemy better than they know themselves. You may die 15 times in one fight, but when you do, you’re immediately resurrected for another run. You have to study their patterns and make good use of your time-slowing abilities to both read and react to their attacks. Rather than acting like a heat-seeking missile as you have through most of the levels, zooming inexorably toward your terrified prey, boss fights put you on the defensive. Some, but not all, stages also end with a climactic boss fight, which again shake up the formula in interesting ways. In some games, moving from a rooftop to an underground bunker might not shake things up to much, but Katana Zero’s focus on precise execution makes even small differences in level layout and enemy placement completely change the flow of an encounter. That’s partly because the core of the game is just so fun, but also because it also continuously transforms by the context of each level. When it ended (after five or six hours), I was satisfied, but could have easily played it for twice the time.
And at the end of each area, usually just a few interconnected rooms long, you get to watch a surveillance video of your successful attempt in real-time, without all the time-bending hijinx you used to achieve it.ĭespite the basic loop staying the same throughout the whole game, Katana Zero never got old for me. You might play a single encounter a dozen times until you get it right, but once you’ve figured out all the angles, you can turn an entire room full of gun-toting thugs into a fine pink mist in a matter of seconds. Knowing when to deflect or dodge gunshots, how to best attack from stealth, and how to use the environment to your advantage can turn an encounter that would be impossible in head-on combat into a swift, balletic victory. You can only slow time for a few seconds before stopping to recharge the power, but it gives you enough time to plan and pull off some really spectacular maneuvers if you use it judiciously. The farther along you get, the more each level starts to feel like a puzzle to be solved more than a fight to win, and the best thing about it is how you can look for solutions on the fly. By the end, you’ll be taking on entire SWAT teams with ease. At the start of the game, you’ll likely struggle against rooms with two or three unarmed opponents in them. It’s a relatively small set of options, but the game is constantly giving you new ways to combine them. You can also slow time with the push of a button, which allows you to ambush your enemies, dodge attacks, and even deflect bullets. In Katana Zero, you’re always equipped with a sword, and you can pick up anything from bottles to smoke grenades to attack at range. Outside of that, though, Katana Zero is a different beast altogether. The core gameplay loop is fairly similar as well: At the start of each stage, you’re given time to plan your approach, then you dive into a level full of enemies to dispatch and you don’t stop moving until either they’re all dead or you are. Both games feature pumping synth soundtracks, high-stakes action, quick deaths and resets, and a protagonist on the verge of mental collapse, not to mention that they’re both published by Devolver Digital. But if you can deal with its clumsy handling of all sorts of sensitive subjects, Katana Zero may be worth checking out for both its sheer high-speed fun and its surprising complexity.Īnother thing that’s clear from the trailer: Katana Zero owes somewhat of a debt to Hotline Miami, but not nearly as much as it might seem at first. If you’re not comfortable with any of that, you may want to skip this one. Katana Zero fails to provide any kind of content warning so here’s one: in addition to its frequent focus on mental illness, drug addiction, and withdrawal, the game also depicts suicide and violence against children. And it is all of those things, but it’s also smarter, funnier, sadder, and more careless with its mature themes than you might think.
If you judge just based on its trailer, Katana Zero appears to be a fast-paced, gory, stylish action game with a killer synth soundtrack and a heavy reliance on ‘80s action movie tropes.