Katana Zero is a game out of time ⏳🗡️
Despite plenty of style and a satisfying combat loop, Katana Zero struggles to make a case for why you should choose it over the games that inspired it.
Katana Zero, out now on PC and Switch and developed by Askiisoft, is a perfectly competent beat ‘em up with a neat bullet time mechanic. It’s also impossible to talk about without immediately comparing to Hotline Miami.
Not only are both games pulling from the same pool of neon-saturated, hyper-violent influences, but their structure is near identical. Both use a one-hit-and-your-dead conceit and both bookend levels by returning you home for a little chunk of exposition.
The difference is that Hotline Miami came out 7 years ago. Riding the coattails of a synthwave/outrun zeitgeist, it felt shocking and refreshing both in presentation and gameplay.
Unfortunately Katana Zero never touches Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin’s seminal game on either front.
Taking place in a dystopian future, the game’s noticeably pretty pixel art is lit by bright pinks and blues, contrasted aptly with grimy factory interiors and rainy city streets. It’s nice to look at but lacks the individuality of Hotline Miami’s flat perspective or the pure vision of something like Ape Out.
The gameplay is a similar story. As the game’s protagonist Zero you’re tasked with clearing out all the bad guys in each stage, with each group of stages ending in a final encounter that’s either a boss or waves of enemies.
The game’s combat is a satisfying mixture of slashing, jumping and rolling around — aided by an ability that lets you slow down time by holding the shoulder button. This power lets you deflect bullets and dodge around enemies with ease, but a lack of restriction on its use ends up stripping away a lot of the game’s difficulty.
There are moments in Katana Zero where I found myself stumped, repeating small chunks of levels till I had them memorized and could charge ahead fluidly. But these moments were too few and far between, and never resulted in the kind of bloody satisfaction Hotline Miami courted.
One thing, however, that does set it apart is the inclusion of a timed dialogue system. Most NPC encounters offered up a number of different conversation styles which, although they don’t affect the thrust of the game’s narrative, do allow for a form of player expression that isn’t often included in these kinds of games.
Despite this, the main story of Katana Zero left me cold. It uses familiar themes and tropes around military conspiracy, evil corporations, and genetic supersoldiers to little effect.
At points, it appears to want to talk about cyclical and institutional violence (similar again to Hotline Miami) but this never quite lands as a coherent message and ends up coming off fairly on-the-nose given the time travel conceit.
All these factors add up to a game that is confidently playable, and often fun, but never extraordinary. Ultimately Katana Zero has bags of style, but none of its own.
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