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November 8, 1999 -- A Brief Review of the Slave Zero Demo

As some of you may know, my first major web-related endeavor was my Haus of Shogo website. Shogo offered more than the standard fare in first-person shooters. Particularly inviting was the opportunity to trudge around major cities as a giant mecha. There's nothing quite like the feeling of power you get from piloting a 30 foot mechanized monstrosity. My only complaint is that the cites seemed very lifeless, a few soldiers, some other mecha, that's about it.

I had great hopes when I first heard about Slave Zero. Even though it is a third-person shooter, the idea of running around a city teeming with life in a huge robot seemed too wonderful to resist. Now that Slave Zero has gone gold (gone for printing and distribution), Accolade has released a new demo to give us a taste of their new code. One caveat, the readme says, "Not all bugs have been fixed. There is still tuning, balancing, and optimizations to do." So while this is newer than the old alpha demo, it is not based on the "gold" code.

I tested the demo on my Celeron 400, 128M SDRAM, Creative Labs AGP TNT (CL 2.08 drivers), Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! Value (Live!Ware 3.0 drivers), Win98 with DirectX 7.

The Good

The graphics to Slave Zero are quite nice, you really get the feeling that you are lumbering around a huge, industrial Hell of a city. Cars swerve to avoid you. Flying cars dodge you. The whole city is teeming with life. Best of all, there are a lot more things that you can destroy. If your crosshair turns red when you point at a building you can destroy it (and you probably should, as there are power-ups hidden inside usually). The buildings collapse with a rather satisfying crash. Enemies explode in a shower of sparks. There's plenty of carnage to be had. For you concerned parents, most of the carnage is bloodless.

The sounds are big, and the EAX support helps give the feeling of "being there". Unlike Shogo's nimble mecha, Slave Zero is big and ponderous and it sounds big and ponderous. As you gain more powerful weapons, the sounds they make get increasingly bigger and more impressive.

The controls are quick to respond, Slave Zero maneuvers the way you would expect him to. All the controls are editable from a standard control menu.

The Bad

There were some graphical glitches I noticed, especially when things blew up. Some textures would temporarily disappear. Helicopters that I shot down would stick on the side of buildings instead of falling to the ground. It was sometimes difficult to tell if you were being hit and damaged.

The AI isn't bad, but it is nothing spectacular either. The enemies do seem to try to gang up on you, but it seems pretty easy to out maneuver them. The AI is certainly better than Shogo's initially was.

When the game first loads the demo level, there is a rather long pause in which the computer appears to do nothing. After a little while it does start up, but it is a bit disconcerting. Also, when the game ends it crashes. That's not a really big deal, except that it doesn't reset my wave volume back to normal so my next Windows event wave is played frightfully loud.

The most glaring fault as far as I'm concerned was the lack of multiplayer capabilities in the demo. One thing that can really extend the life of a product is its online performance. Unless they release a new demo based on the gold code, you will have to buy the game to find out how it plays online.

The Conclusion

I've played this demo several times over, which is certainly saying something. I can't really define it, but it just seems fun. If you liked Shogo, I highly recommend that you check out Slave Zero. If you are looking for something a little different from the standard shooters, give it a try. I may just have to pick this one up! Big robots. Boom. A good time is had by all.

For more information of Slave Zero, see the official Slave Zero site or the unofficial but still worthwhile Slave Zero News.