Developer: Accolade Publisher: Infogrames
Release Date: Oct. 31st, 1999 Platform: Dreamcast (also on PC)
You know, I love doing Retro Reviews for the Dreamcast. Ever since the system died, I just haven’t been playing it as much. And although any excuse is a good one, playing it for work just seems the best reason.
And I’ve been working on this review all week. 
Slave Zero has been labeled as a ‘forgettable’ game. But of course, I beg to differ. At the time, games like SZ showed us how far consoles had come to becoming the home arcade we had all hoped for. And the fact that it still garners a fair bit of chatter online places it firmly in the ‘overlooked’ section of gaming history as far as I’m concerned.
Know what? Hit the link to see what I’m talking about.
Now you have to remember that the casual gaming market wasn’t even a fraction of what it was today. Safe to say that anyone who owned a Dreamcast was a hardcore gamer considering the amount of crap that Sega had been throwing at us in the way of hardware years before. Loyalty had a different face those days. Also remember that Arcades were still the only real way to play a game in its purist form (conversions to consoles still weren’t faring all that well back then). And Slave Zero was an Arcade action game through and through.
Now to call SZ a complex game would be a complete lie. The story gave you all the motivation you needed to cause carnage. About 500 years in the future, the world is under the control of a man called Lu Chen aka. SovKhan. He had a vast and neigh-invincible army under his command that continued to grow and spread across the globe (damn Warlords). The most effective section of his forces were cyborgs called ‘Slaves’. These beasts were three stories high and grown from a cybernetic embryo with a mysterious substance known only as ‘Dark Matter’. Now you have to realize that this wasn’t nearly as cheesy sounding back then as it is today.
So of course, a single Slave unit was captured and reprogrammed as ‘Slave Zero‘ by the freedom fighters known as the ‘Guardians’. This singular unit also is the Earth’s only hope for freedom – go figure.
From there, it’s a bevy of smashing various objects, shooting things up and defeating lots of enemies. I gotta say that picking up random things off of the street and throwing them around was a first for me in gaming. Interacting with environments in any way was still a new thing back then. Destructible environments was still a novel thing that blew some minds at the time. My favorite was throwing cars around and at your enemies – which really never gets old in this game (not that it does a great deal of damage, but still). Upgradable weapons and utilities gave a good sense of character building not seen a whole lot outside of RPGs. In the last stages, some of your gun upgrades get larger than your Slave unit – which is always awesome.
Then there are the boss battles. Early bosses were rather ho-hum at first, but then they got really interesting really quick. In one battle you find yourself leaping from rooftop to rooftop chasing a snake-like Slave unit that separates into two halves that you have to move damn quick to defeat. It’s a bit jarring as the difficulty ramps up quickly. Precision movements and shooting are a must. And while they’re taxing to your abilities, they’re far from impossible. But then again, who wants to play a game that they can just breeze through right?
Slave Zeros’ multiplayer deathmatch was some of the best seen on the Dreamcast. There were several multiplayer-tailored stages that were brilliantly designed with just enough nooks and crannies to keep your friends on their feet. Even without all the online options today that serve as the standard in many games, SZ managed to keep people coming back with good old-fashioned level design, a thing that many modern games seem to have lost, unfortunately. Damn kids.
Overall, I very much recommend this game to anyone with a Dreamcast or PC. It will of course seem very outdated by today’s standards, but give it a little time and you’ll see how this game represents an all too quickly forgotten point in gaming history where new frontiers were vast and trying new things reflected the developers firm commitment to quality – even in their C-titles. I only wish other developers could get their heads right like they did back then.
Then again, there were way more crappy titles around those days, weren’t there? Huh.
Overall – Then: 7.5 out of 10 Now: 7 out of 10
