by Andrew FarrellI’d been patiently waiting for Motorslice for actual years. Seeing as so much of the game has you cut down robots in a manner reminiscent of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, I was sold from the get-go. However, it’s not really an action game, focusing more on a Prince of Persia-esque experience. While there are many things to like about it, some baffling control issues significantly damage the game. I don’t regret playing it, but I do hope the devs improve the controls in the coming weeks to make the game less aggravating.
You play the part of a woman solely called P, a “slicer” who’s been tasked with going and destroying a bunch of rogue machines. There’s barely any actual plot and story sequences are mostly just P monologuing to her drone, Orbie, who functions as the game’s camera. You can select responses on occasion, but P can’t understand you most of the time. P is voiced very nicely by Kira Buckland, who did the English dub voice for 2B (who is of course actually named 2P) in NieR: Automata (another game where you mostly kill robots). Huh, they stuck pretty close to that template, didn’t they?
Motorslice is divided into several chapters where you’ll progress by jumping, climbing, and fighting enemies. Most chapters end with a Shadow of the Colossus-style boss battle against a giant machine, but this is very much a trial-and-error platforming game where you’ll probably die hundreds of times during your playthrough. The game’s marketing (and apparent popularity) mostly seems to hinge on how cute P is, but you’ll see her die gruesomely, such as seeing her get bloodily decapitated by enemy saw blades and the like.
The issues with the game’s controls weren’t incredibly apparent to me early on, as the first few chapters are mostly pretty lax when it come to progressing. P has a chainsaw weapon that she can swing (and her swings can be charged), she can slide (although this is weirdly replaced with a dodge roll when in combat), lock onto enemies, and parry their strikes when you both attack simultaneously. There are strangely only three regular enemy types; diggers, flying drones, and bulldozers. As such, the combat tends to get pretty old early on, but that’s not a big deal since the platforming and parkour are the focus.
In terms of parkour, the game’s jumping feels too rigid. You simply have very little air control, which led to countless deaths for me, as I’d try to reach things in the air and just plummet to my death time and again. You’ll constantly be relying on P’s wall mobility, but it too is also incredibly rigid. Jumping into a wall while facing it will see her climb it some. You can do a back eject out of this and chain these to wall jump too, which works decently since you’ll be locked into your orientation. Jumping into a wall at an angle, on the other hand, will cause her to wall run.
This all sounds well and good, but it’s incredibly easy to accidentally do a wall run when attempting to climb and vice versa. Just as above, I died a great many times because I wanted P to wall run and she instead just climbed, leading her to fall and die yet again. This sadly isn’t the only instance of said frustration. You’ll often find yellow walls that you’re supposed to traverse using your chainsaw, which is a ridiculously cool feature, but the problem remains. Chainsawing a wall while facing forward causes P to ride upward, while attempting it from the side will let you chainsaw left and right.
For whatever reason, I found it even more difficult to get P to orient herself as I needed during these sections. It’s even worse with these than the wallrunning because there are parts where you need to drop off a wall while chainsawing it and then change directions. Most of the time I’d move the analog stick, only for P to do the exact same thing she was doing before. All of this is simply not responsive enough, as it feels spotty and inexact, which is the absolute last thing you want in a precision platformer. I’d wager that the vast majority of my nearly 500 deaths in-game were due to this simple issue.
Having to redo a lengthy section because the controls don’t work is simply inexcusable, and it often left me dreading the next one. There’s also the fact that the game’s signposting isn’t all that great all of the time either, so it can be tough to tell which way the game wants you to go. This extends to the boss battles, as I sometimes didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing. Motorslice really needed some extra QA for all of this. Bosses mostly have several yellow spots on them that you’re supposed to chainsaw in order to put them down, but these can be kind of tedious since it’s hard to tell which parts you’ve damaged.
Boss battles are made more obnoxious due to the fact that P tends to die in a single hit. For longer boss battles, this means that you can lose a lot of progress by simply making a single mistake. The flying drone enemies that shoot saws at you can one shot you before you know they’re there and falling from slightly high up will instakill you too. There are simply multiple ways for the game to get under your skin, especially considering that so many deaths will be due to the controls failing and not user error.
Each game section has a set number of optional drones to collect and return to a return point, and it’s here that the more egregious challenges lie. I’d do them on occasion, but I value my dwindling sanity enough that I didn’t attempt to do the majority. They’re easy to spot, at least, since you can enter a scan mode at the press of a button and highlight any enemies or orbs in the vicinity. Overall, Motorslice took me a solid ten hours to beat, but it’ll be a bit less if you don’t try to collect optional drones.
When all is said and done, I really wish that climbing and wallrunning had their own buttons that activate them, rather than simply throwing P at a wall. This would allow for far greater control than simply hoping you hit the wall at the right angle. The same goes for the chainsawing, which is even more aggravating. These mechanics, as they are, simply don’t feel reliable at all to me, which is the number one thing that mars the game.
This is a fairly unique game that’s pretty impressive in some ways, given its indie nature, but the controls and signposting simply aren’t good enough. With some tweaks to the platforming, wall running, and wall chainsawing, this would be a far better game, but as it stands, it’s too frustrating for general audiences, even if I think most people interested in the concept will still be able to overlook its many foibles.
Motorslice
