Well, this was a surprise. It seems like another indie game has caught me off guard and reeled me in like a fish having a spear jabbed through its entire body. There are not that many things these days that really get me excited anymore. A new film comes out and I’m not really motivated to see it in theaters. A new fast food restaurant opens up nearby and I rather eat at the same greek restaurant that I usually go to run by the independent family I really respect for their hard work. The same goes for video games, no matter how big and fancy the latest releases look I won’t buy it immediately. I’ll watch from afar as hundreds of other amateurs spend a full sixty dollars at launch and come back later to complain how it wasn’t worth the full price. Then why did you buy it immediately rather than look up a review, see if it’s worth it, and wait for the game to go on sale? Well I’m not like most people though, so can’t really judge them. Instead of being exactly them I look more towards the indie scene, because that’s where all the works of art are secretly lying beneath the trash fire that is the video game market. It’s hard to find a good game these days, especially since journalists and critics are more focused on popular topics and the screw ups Triple A companies make. You can say I’m an indie gobbler, because I just love indie games and indie developers so much!
Recently I just played through a title that came out earlier this year and it has to be one of the shiniest gems of the year. I am of course talking about Katana Zero, which just so happens to be made by a solo developer named Justin Stander. Ten years ago, Justin created his own independent studio named Askiisoft and before Katana Zero came into exsistence he created another lesser known title known as Tower of Heaven, which was a simple 2D platformer about a shady figure climbing up a tower. It was challenging, deep, and Justin’s start towards becoming a dedicated game designer. During college Justin tried to picture what his next game would be about and that’s when he came up with the idea for Katana Zero. Originally Justin thought the game would be a shortproject that would only take two years to make. A simple, linear, mindless killing game about a bathrobe-wearing swordsman running around and slaughtering people.
However, Katana Zero took longer to make than Justin thought stretching out to about five years of development. Justin worked several days and nights coding Katana Zero, wanting it to be the best it could. Developing the game was difficult, but trying to get it out to the public was a much harder task. Justin didn’t want Katana Zero to flop on day one so he partnered up with Devolver Digital, a company known for publishing several small indie games. Devolver Digital would help market Katana Zero and provide the funding Justin needed to tidy the final product up. In 2019, Katana Zero was released and luckily those who played it were blown away by how stunning the game was. They praised how brave Katana Zero was to approach psychotic violent themes that most games wouldn’t usually attempt to touch. They liked how addicting and fast paced the simplistic killing action was. They especially liked the storytelling and Katana Zero revealed it’s acid trip plot and mind boggling world. It’s been roughly four months since Katana Zero’s released and I finally decided to see what the hype was all about.
I had little to no knowledge about the game at all, but from what I saw in the trailers it looked pretty damn cool. So I gave the game a shot and wouldn’t you know it I beat it within the span of two days. Katana Zero exceeded my expectations and deserves all the praise it is currently getting. It’s so beautiful and entrancing that I don’t even know how to describe it. Katana Zero is a game that everyone should try out at least once. We’re not even halfway through the review and I am already highly recommending it to my readers. Today we’ll be talking about why I think Katana Zero is such an amazing game and why it deserves your attention. So put on your bathrobe, sit down with your psychiatrist, and prepare to slice your way through unknown mysteries.
Story
The game takes place in the neon lit city of New Mecca, home to millions of individuals. You’ll see rich people living in apartments high above and you’ll see poor people living in the ghettos below. You’ll eat out at a fancy casino restaurant and then you’ll walk home to find another homeless man begging for change. You’ll see the occasional weekly street gang violence and the SWAT force trying to bring these criminals down. May have the highest crime rate in the world, but it’s a city of dreams and you are one big dreamer... well not really. You play as a bathrobe wearing unnamed swordsman who lives in a runned down section of New Mecca and served during the Cromag War.
A few years ago, New Mecca’s government declared war on an unnamed foreign nation. We don’t know who attacked first and why they went to war, but we are told that New Mecca was close to victory and immediately lost within a few days due to unknown reasons. The city has been left in shambles ever since then with the crime rate rising faster than a living rocket high on drugs. Speaking of drugs, let’s talk a little more about our unnamed swordsman. The swordsman struggles to remember what happened during the Cromag War, the only thing he remembers is a scientist barging into a room with another child sitting in the middle and being shot right in front of him. Possibly suffering from PTSD, the swordsman decides to visit a psychiatrist for help.
The psychiatrist is more special than you think, as he injects the swordsman with a strange drug that allows him to look into the future and slow time down to a crawl. Everyday he assigns the swordsman a target to assassinate and the swordsman uses his time bending powers to predict events and slice his way through goons. You're not told why the swordsman works for the psychiatrist, why the psychiatrist assigns assasination targets, or where the drug came from, but we’ll get more into that later.
During one of the swordsman’s recent missions to kill a DJ named Electrohead, the target starts to scream about a stash of drugs he used a few nights before. He bought them during an illegal auction and has been seeing disturbing things ever since he injected them into his systems. He states time has been slowing down around him, he’s been seeing both the future & past, and the side effects are more traumatizing than they look. The swordsman realizes the description for the drug sounds a lot similar to his, but when he tries to ask Electrohead another question the DJ is shot by an unknown blue-haired mobster. The swordsman escapes the building and the next day he visits his psychiatrist for his next dosage and target.
Before getting injected with his drug the swordsman tells the psychiatrist about what Electrohead said. The psychiatrist specifically told the swordsman not to talk to his target, but ignores his question anyways. The swordsman begins to recall the events from the Cromag War and begins to question who he really is. Wanting to discover more about the past, the swordsman begins to track down individuals related to the drug he has been using and seek more answers about what is really going on. Some memories are more twisted than you think. Better left to be forgotten with time.
Gameplay
Katana Zero focuses on one objective for each stage and one objective alone. To slaughter every enemy in each room and make it to the end of the level so you can kill your target. The most satisfying part of Katana Zero’s kill ‘em up gameplay is that every enemy dies in one hit. You slash towards them, you hear a powerful burst of blood, and the enemy falls to the ground. It helps give off that feeling of being a badass swordsman like the cover of the game suggests. The gameplay is heavily inspired by Hotline Miami, another killing game where everything dies in one hit and it is also published by Devolver Digital. However to balance the one hit kills out, Justin made it so that if you take a single hit then you die and have to start whatever room you are in all over. Some of you may think this method of die, try again, die, and repeat may get tedious very quickly but just because a game is hard doesn't mean it’s constantly punishing you. Katana Zero’s levels are open in a way so that each room is spread apart from each other and you have multiple ways to clear out entire floors.
The easiest way to kill your enemies is to slash at them using your katana, which can boost you forward and even allow you to chain huge combos while in midair. You can also use your katana to parry certain enemy attacks which will leave them stunned and even reflect bullets which will fly back at your enemies and kill them. If it’s not your katana you're probably using your surroundings to your advantage. You're running through each room, picking up objects, throwing them through the air, and finding things you can interact with so you can eliminate foes without them even spotting you. A molotov cocktail will light up an entire group of enemies, but if you use it on a room filled with red oil barrels it may blow up. A smoke grenade may form a huge cloud of smoke which can blind enemies and allow you to attack them without being spotted. Sometimes areas can be filled with traps and you can knock enemies into them. If you plan out the most effective route you can clear out rooms within seconds.
If you are struggling you can use your time slow ability. Using this ability you can slow down everything around for a short amount of time, giving you an easier time to dodge enemy attacks and predict what will happen next. So if the room next to you is filled with let’s say five guys, three of them with guns, you better use your time slow ability if you want to come out alive. Be cautious as you only have a few seconds to use this ability before the time meter runs out and everything reverts back to its usual speed. The best time to use this ability is when you're surrounded by multiple guys at once, because getting attacked from every direction will make you panic or overwhelmed.
Once in a while you will be given the opportunity to talk to characters and you will be given multiple dialogue options to respond with. You could quickly respond with a mean/sarcastic remark, but if you wait patiently you can answer with more reasonable answers. Doing so allows conversation to go out more smoothly and helps flesh out the world you are in. I like this idea because the creator is saying you could just go back to playing a mindless killing game, or you can take the time to appreciate the story and characters I have created. It’s a great way for world building rather than constantly stopping the player to spew mass amounts into their face and then throw them back in after making them feel bored. Half of the time they won’t remember it because they didn’t want to hear all of it at that exact moment. Besides that there isn’t much else I can say about Katana Zero’s gameplay. It does a good job at making you feel like a badass and sometimes makes you aware of what you are doing. With your fast reflexes and incredible skills you should be able to face what lies ahead in your future.
Thoughts
As I stated earlier Katana Zero is the type of game that you have to play the whole way through to fully appreciate it. Almost everything this game sets out to do is done perfectly and goes beyond what games of a similar formula would do. The combat is hard to master and can be hard to get used to, but extremely rewarding once you start pulling some badass moments. It is fast paced, brutally animated, feels vicious, and never gets boring throughout your entire playthrough. The game gives you enough tools and space to work with, so that you don’t have too little or too much. The game even shows a playback whenever you clear a room. Showing everything you just did at a normal speed, even if you used your time slow ability. Basically Justin is pointing at the screen and saying to the player, “You see that? Your a motherf*cking badass!”
The graphics may be pixelated, but the game contains some of the most beautiful scenery I’ve seen in pixelated video games besides a few others like Owlboy and another indie I have coming up shortly. The soundtrack is just god damn amazing and catchy as hell. I actually want to congratulate the composers for this game, LudoWic and Bill Kiley, for making tracks that fit in with the game’s neon lit dystopian setting.
The story for Katana Zero is actually really good, one of the driving factors that will make you progress with the game. A majority of players may ignore it entirely, but the world and characters are pretty deep if you invest the time into them. A swordsman who recollects his past and soon realizes he is a bigger monster than he thought he was. Then there’s the fact he is uncovering a government conspiracy and what his city claimed was just actually ended up being really corrupt. There’s also the psychedelic aspects which the game handles very well. When it wants to be trippy, scary, or break the fourth wall it does it pretty well. There’s this one moment by the end where you witness the swordsman go into an all out breakdown and seeing what he does is somewhat disturbing. Watching the world fall apart around him like dripping paint.
Besides the story elements, Katana Zero also has a butt ton of replay value thanks to it’s extra modes. A hard mode which makes the game more challenging, and a speedrun mode to test the player’s reflexes and skills as they strip away the story cutscenes and allow them to run wild through each level. Justin said he is currently developing DLC for the game which I am very excited for, because there were some unanswered questions the game left me with by the end.
While I am praising Katana Zero for how awesome it is there are a few complaints. Most of them being minor nitpicks though. Some of the enemy placement in the last few areas can be questionable and make the final moments frustrating for a first run. I was playing this game on consoles and trying to throw an object while running around at full speed can be wonky at times. There’s this one section that tries to be a stealth section, but it’s impossible to sneak around enemies when they are arranged in a way to spot you no matter what. However, this level doesn’t even require a stealthy approach so what is the bloody point of it? Finally, this isn’t much of a complaint and is more of a compliment in my opinion, but the game lasts up to four hours long which is a good run time for this type of game. I stated in my Furi review that you can have a game that is awesome to play, but if it overstays its welcome it starts to get stale. That's why Katana Zero lasting up to four hours is the perfect amount.
In the end, Katana Zero is an amazing game with an addicting core gameplay loop, well told narrative that keeps you asking for more, and fantastic art direction. All of which managed to exceed my expectations. There aren't that many issues I have with the game that ruins the overall experience. I really do hope Katana Zero wins a few rewards by the end of this year, because Justin deserves it for creating what is a mindboggling masterpiece. In the end I am giving Katana Zero a 9.5/10 for excellence at best.
Comments