Slave Zero plays like
Crash Bandicoot on acid. Well, mostly. You are the pilot of a biomechanical weapon, stolen from the enemy, and you’re the resistance’s only hope. Blah, blah. What the game boils down to is kicking ass, and lots of it, and
Slave Zero has ass-kicking in droves. The levels are all pretty linear, with occasional wrong terms, but nothing major. And in that sense, it’s the most like the
Crash Bandicoot series of games for the PSX. After that, however, comparisons cease to be realistic. Crash has... a spin attack.
Slave Zero has megaton missiles. Yeah, baby.
Piloting Slave Zero, you’ll find yourself in a variety of environments (although all contained in the mega-city), such as the sewer system where you must guide a convoy to safety or the surface where you must destroy a gigantic battleship. The lush environments are eminently destroyable, with most small structures going down in flames after a missile hit or a few rounds of your machine gun. You’ll run around and blow up lots of enemy sentinels, basically weak-ass versions of Slave Zero. Each has its own method of destruction, and each has a best way to destroy, from machine guns to strafing while firing missiles. My least, and therefore, most favorite are the evil spider-droids, which come out in droves in the convoy levels. They still give me the shivers.
There’s a plot, too, and it develops as the game goes on, actually giving some sense of continuity to the game. And you almost always start a given level where you ended the last one, making the game feel like a solid whole. Slave Zero’s execution in this manner is spot-on.
