MOTORSLICE by developer Regular Studio and publisher Top Hat Studios. PS5 Review by Richard with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Are you
ready to slice and dice in some mechanical mayhem? Do you love exploring abandoned
megastructures full of traps looking to kill you? DO YOU DO PARKOUR? Well then,
may I introduce you to MOTORSLICE.
In
MOTORSLICE we are introduced to a girl known as ‘P’. P has come to a
megastructure in the middle of a desert with the goal of wiping out all the
sentient construction equipment that currently inhabits it. Armed with her
handy chainsaw, she’s a force to be reckoned with. Being a megastructure
inhabited solely by machines, the construction is anything but human friendly.
As such, P will need to run, climb, crawl, and parkour her way to the top of
the structure.
MOTORSLICE has a pretty refreshing gameplay style, being a cool mix of Mirror’s Edge and
Shadow of the Colossus. What this means is that you’ll be doing parkour through
a section of the megastructure, usually introducing a new mechanic to you, swinging
from rods and climbing poles while dispatching the occasional group of enemies,
until you reach the top of the area. At the top you will do battle with an
elder machine, which in this case is a giant piece of construction equipment.
So, let’s
take a look at megastructure climbing and exploration to start off. As a game
with a focus on parkour, you will do a lot of running, jumping, climbing, wall
riding, and using your chainsaw to properly ride up or across walls. Let’s go over
some of the basics first. You can run up or along walls depending on how you
jump at them, climb and jump from poles, and swing on rods. You can climb up
and around cracks on the walls, leap from walls or objects, and do a sort of
tuck and roll to get a little more distance or control.
Lots of
areas of interest are colour-coded orange (or yellow) for your convenience.
These colours indicate areas you should pay attention to, and usually indicate
a way forward or something you can interact with in a parkour sense. Included
in these are these yellow-orange mechanical style walls. With these walls you
can pull out your chainsaw and ride them. You can go both horizontally and
vertically, but only one direction at a time. Basically if you’re aiming along
the wall, you shoot along it. If you’re aiming up it, you shoot up it. It’s
also used to make transitions between large zones faster, i.e. after a boss as
you’re heading toward the next themed segment of the megastructure.
Along the
way you may come across a rest stop where P can catch a break. If you decide to
take a pause here, P may strike up conversation with the drone that’s been
following her around. Actually, your viewpoint as a player is from the drone,
which is a really interesting manner to in-game justify a third person point of
view. The rest-stops are a way of exposition for interesting things you may
have seen and some background world-building about the megastructure, robot
uprising, P herself, as well as the world you find yourself in.
The drone
that follows you around isn’t the only one you’ll see. There are a bunch of miscellaneous
drones scattered throughout the megastructure. If you find and touch them, you
can bring them back to certain locations to “cash them in” as it were. These
are entirely optional, and generally provide a good challenge of your parkour
skills to get and return with. If you’re having trouble finding them, you can
activate a vision mode that will highlight drones even through walls, as well
as the walls you can use your chainsaw on. It’s pretty handy when going for the
extra drones or trying to orient yourself.
Next let’s
talk about non-boss combat. As you explore, you’ll run into small groups of
enemies. These fellas are hostile, and it’s your duty to dispatch them. Or
rather, you kinda have to since their existence creates a sort of barrier that
prevents you from continuing until they’re all dead. Thankfully combat is
pretty fluid and quick with most of the enemies dying in one or two hits. You
slice the enemies in half, or deflect saw blades shot at you to dispatch your
foes, and I can definitely say that the sawblade parrying is actually really
fun once you get used to it.
While enemies
only die in a few hits, unfortunately so do you. On the plus side, death is
relatively cheap in MOTORSLICE. You’re expected to die a lot, so there are many
checkpoints to respawn from, and the loading is pretty fast. You can also
manually reset to a checkpoint as well. I say checkpoints, but it’s closer to a
respawn point I suppose? There are also checkpoints in each chapter, based on
segments of the megastructure, that you can return to the main menu to select.
These will drop you at the start of a mini segment, but there are multiple
points to respawn from within these checkpoints usually.
Now, let’s
talk about the big bad bosses, the oversized construction equipment. When you
reach a boss, the first few things you’ll likely notice are: one it’s really
massive, and two it has a segmented health bar. Here’s where the “Shadow of the
Colossus” parallel comes into play. You have to scale the mighty machine, then
use your chainsaw to “ride” along some segments of the mechanical monstrosity
similar to the walls you’ve been using. The different parts you need to ride
along correspond to the different health bars. Each boss is incredibly unique
both in design and in the manner you need to tackle it in. Some you can get to
and start climbing, others have mechanics you need to use to take it down. It’s
a huge amount of fun.
There are a
few frustrations I had while playing through MOTORSLICE, although thankfully
they’re rather minor. The biggest issue I found was trying to land on small
platforms that can be rather frustrating. Usually you end up sliding off either
because you started rolling or you had too much momentum. While this doesn’t
happen so often that I would get fed up, and normally it only happened while
going for the bonus drones, figuring out how to orient yourself is key.
Speaking of orienting yourself, the amount of times I ran at a wall and
accidentally went up it instead of across it, or vice-versa, was moderately
frustrating. While this isn’t a big deal in long segments because the nature of
the segments of wall running or jumping leans away from this being an issue, I
definitely ran off a wall a few times more than I would care to admit.
Admittedly this is partially a me problem, but you definitely need to learn how
your orientation and button pressing affects how you interact with walls.
The only
other real conundrum I had was when I was looking for bonus drones, and I
accidentally went the right way for story and not drones, and hit a checkpoint
along the way. Returning from some checkpoints can be really tough if you aren’t
going back to a previous one through the menu. Overall a very minor issue, as
you can always just go back to the previous checkpoint in the menu and you
retain your drone collection, but it could be a bit frustrating at times. An
option to go back a checkpoint/respawn point within a segment would be a nice
quality of life option, but like I mentioned, only a concern if you’re trying
to do everything on your first playthrough without going back through areas.
Now we get
to talk about the visuals. An amazing job in the design department for MOTORSLICE,
described as “modern low-poly graphics”, the atmosphere of the megastructure
combined with the gameplay style mesh incredibly well creating a sort of retro
yet modern combined feeling that for me really helped sell the aesthetic. While
enemy designs don’t have much variation for the common mooks, the bosses are
wonderfully innovatively designed both in terms of look and methods to beat. A
somewhat upbeat music choice while fighting the towering menaces also helps
keep the frustration of many failed attempts at bay as you may find yourself
challenging the bosses again and again until you can beat them.
Overall
MOTORSLICE is a really great title that I feel really shines through. With an
action packed core coupled with some fun parkour and cool bosses, I can pretty
confidently claim MOTORSLICE as one of my favourite games of the year so far.
Utilizing a rarer art-style and interaction method between the main character
and player is also a well received choice for the apocalyptic megastructure
setting. While it isn’t the longest game I’ve ever played, my first though on
clearing it was “this was really fun. I want more. When is the sequel coming
out.” Thankfully it’s also not overpriced for it’s length, so I’m happy about
that as well. As a final word, I would like to congratulate the developer on
making such a wonderful title that mixes two underused styles into something I
was absolutely enamored with. I highly anticipate their future titles and hope
they keep up the good work.
Score: 9.5 / 10
