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
