So what is Accolade and Infogrames' Slave Zero? Think of a sixty-foot tall cyborg smashing, bashing, crashing, and shooting its way through everything in sight. Now imagine you're the cyborg. We're not wholly sure why, but there's something about being ten times bigger than everyone else that makes us feel all powerful. We like feeling all-powerful, but do we like Slave Zero? Read on and find out...or we'll smack you with a trout!
While Slave Zero is, at its heart, a heavily action-oriented third-person shooter, it does have a plot. You are Chan, a member of a clan of warrior priests, the Guardians. You have been melded with a gigantic stolen cybernetic war machine, Slave Zero. Your mission is to destroy the tyrannical SovKhan and his evil corporate dynasty before he unleashes a legion of ultra-violent slave cyborgs more powerful than even you, or possibly does even nastier things. You'll have to use big guns, bigger guns, and yes, the biggest guns to do it. And don't think for a second that SovKhan is going to make it easy for you, no sir! He's sending thousands of slaves, most of them weaker and smaller than you, to put an end to your insolence.
As mentioned, Slave Zero is a third-person shooter where you get to go around shooting enemies like monkeys in a barrel. Actually, it's nothing as easy as that, but it's still fun. The controls are much like that of a first-person shooter (FPS). You can turn, jump, strafe and shoot as quickly and easily as any FPS. The controls are easy to learn, easy to customize, and quick to respond.
The enemy AI is not terribly clever, moves predictably, and has some serious path-finding problems, but each enemy unit uses its own particular strengths rather well. Also, several units often work in concert to make your job difficult.
The game starts off easily and does drag on a bit for the first few levels, but soon things get exciting; you start getting more and more powerful weapons and the enemies get tougher. The latter levels also require more skill to survive. Early on you're often in wide-open areas where navigation and dodging is easy. Later on you'll find yourself on small buildings, bridges and outcroppings, where dodging takes skill and a steady hand. The levels get more difficult by clever design, not by making the enemy units faster or more numerous as is the norm in shooters. Our enjoyment of Slave Zero actually increased the more we played it, which is very unusual with this type of game. Shooters usually lack depth of play, and for the first few missions Slave Zero does as well, but as things progress, the levels get more involving, difficult and intelligent. We were impressed by the play of Slave Zero.
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