Slave Zero X and Evil West Reviewed
Flush twice
Slave Zero X and Evil West have a lot in common. Sure, there’s the surface level stuff like their dark, gritty visuals. They’re both horror-adjacent, they have you fighting against monstrosities in twisted worlds. They’re both action games with a focus on flashy combat. They both suck, I dropped them after two hours, they can be solved easily. That sort of thing.
Wait, what was that last part again?
If you were expecting a positive review, you got one, because this is a double negative, and as you know, a double negative is a positive. Alright, that’s not how it works. I’m going to tell you why I didn’t like Slave Zero X nor Evil West. This is also a plea to developers to stop making solvable games.
Slave Zero X
Slave Zero X is a side-scrolling action beat ‘em up. It’s all about performing combos that are so crazy, they border on being kuh-rayzy. Save the world from some threat or something, I don’t know, I skipped the cutscenes. I’m here for the gameplay, and boy is there a lot of that here. This is an action-focused game all about slicing through hordes of enemies with style.
It wears its inspirations on its sleeve, and it’s inspired by everything. Guilty Gear, Strider 2, Marvel vs Capcom 2 and 3, Ninja Gaiden, BlazBlue, Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, Super Smash Bros, Metal Gear Rising, Devil May Cry, and a partridge in a pear tree. It takes concepts and mechanics from these games and throws them in a blender to make something new. Some of the mechanics, like the burst and roman cancel, are lifted straight from their source game and thrown in as is, like copying and pasting a Wikipedia article into your homework.
C-C-C-COMBO
Slave Zero X is all about combos. It’s inspired by a lot of fighting games, and as you all know, fighting games are all about combos. Combos and nothing more. There are a ton of ways to stack hits on enemies. You have a basic 3-hit attack string like in a beat-em-up, which ends in a launcher. You also have a standalone launcher to send enemies flying, then follow up with an air combo. You can also use roman cancel to stop your attack in its tracks and launch another one immediately. If you guessed it lets you do big combos, you’d be right. Combos combo into combos, which combo into combos in a combo-like manner. Combo.
The combo aspect of the game is a lot of fun, if a little mashy. Moves flow into each other seamlessly and it has some interesting technical aspects. Like in Marvel vs Capcom 3, there’s a limit to how many times you can bounce an enemy on the ground or against the wall. There’s a dive-kick, which can be jump-cancelled for more height. Jump cancelling is a large part of the system, allowing you to take to the air at a moment’s notice to avoid attacks or keep a string going. There are very few rules, and anything cancels into anything, which is meant to make the combat feel very open-ended and free-flowing, but it ends up feeling mashy, as you can press buttons and it will work the majority of the time.
But… what if you can’t combo?
The Other Stuff
The game throws dozens of enemies at you at once to make sure you earn your combos. Enemies spawn on both sides of the screen, constantly surrounding you, making sure you can’t style on anything for too long. They can style on you for as long as they want. Whenever you get hit, you are put into hitstun for a full second. In later encounters, getting hit once is like getting thrown into an industrial washing machine with no way of getting out. Other than the burst, that is.
Having to burst out of enemy offense seems like a cop-out to me. It’s a way of saying “Yeah, the damage is insane, and you’ll be getting juggled for uncomfortably long periods of time, so the best solution we could come up with was a button that literally stops everything”. When you don’t have the burst available, your goose is cooked, so you’d best be on your best behavior. Dodge everything, parry and basically just don’t get hit.
Thankfully, you can control large groups of enemies with your massive hitboxes. Each of your attacks takes up a huge portion of the screen, letting you hit anything in your current zip code. The same ample hit stun that you take when hit is applied to the enemy, which lets you keep them in check.
Why does it suck?
This doesn’t sound too bad. In fact, it sounds kind of fun. A difficult, combo-heavy beat ‘em up that has a lot of hit stun and makes you earn your style. What’s so bad about it?
Well, remember the burst mechanic, and how it was lifted from Guilty Gear? Well, it also brought its cousin, the gold burst, along for the ride. This is a kind of burst that, when activated, completely fills your meter. When you have full meter, you can activate Devil Trigger, which is a super-powered state where you can use special moves through its duration. After the Devil Trigger ends, you can use burst again. So you use the gold burst, and you have Devil Trigger again.
You can stay in Devil Trigger infinitely, where you can spam EX moves. The cancel-heavy and free-flowing nature of the combat means you can cancel anything into anything, including one move into itself, and during Devil Trigger, this applies to EX moves as well.
Combine this with the massive hitboxes on your attacks and the ample hit stun, and you get a solved game. All you have to do is chain burst into Devil Trigger endlessly and roll your face on the controller to kill everything on screen. It takes zero effort or thought.
If that’s too technical for you, you can also just chain the first two hits of the basic attack combo to jab lock your enemies forever.
The fact that this has been in the game since release and it has never been patched out, makes me think it’s not an exploit, but an intended mechanic, and the way to play the game. There’s an entire combo mechanic and different moves to use, but it’s all invalidated because you can stay in god mode all the time and mash buttons like a chimpanzee. If you’re not mashing buttons like a chimp, you can loop the first two attacks of your combo and win. You can ignore the defensive mechanics, the dodge, the parry and everything else. Just mash. It’s a solved game.
When I figured this out, I was completely deflated. Why bother engaging with anything other than the exploit? Sure, I could play the game normally and not do that, but why would I? If you were in a race, a regular footrace, and you had the option of using a car instead, would you still run? Sure, you could choose to do it the right way, for sport’s sake, but the option is there, and you’ll still get a gold medal if you zoom past the finish line in a Bugatti.
This dumb exploit and the mess of copy and pasted mechanics from other games makes me think the developer just threw things in here without understanding why they exist in the first place, or without considering how they would fit in the end product. Guilty Gear has burst. I like Guilty Gear, so my game has burst, too. I like Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, so my game has parries and EX moves. I like Devil May Cry, so my game has Devil Trigger. How would those work together? Who knows. I don’t.
This comes back to my snarky little comment earlier about fighting games being all about combos. Along with not really considering how the mechanics work, I’m starting to think the developer didn’t consider how the source games work, either. It’s “inspired by fighting games”, but only from their most surface level traits. The big combos, the tech, pressing buttons, dodge cancelling an attack into a launcher, jump-cancelling the launcher into an air combo then EX air resetting double kick flip into a relaunch Devil Trigger cancel with cheese and onions hold the pickles. It’s all the Twitter clip nonsense while missing the most fundamental part of fighting games: The neutral. There is no real sense of spacing or neutral in this game. No footsies. It’s all button mashing. Even old and “primitive” games, old-school beat-em-ups like Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, had less mechanics but they felt more like fighting games thanks to their focus on spacing and out-maneuvering your opponents.
In closing, I don’t recommend Slave Zero X. It’s a misguided effort with a ton of style and zero substance. It misunderstands its source mechanics and puts them all into a game where they don’t really fit, then it gives you a nuke so you can ignore all of it.
It’s a good litmus test to see if you actually play games. If you don’t figure out the exploits, which are incredibly easy to find, then you didn’t really play the game. If you think this is a good action game, then see me at the end of the article. I have a really nice bridge to sell you. Refunded.
Evil West
Evil West is a 3D action brawler. You’re a cowboy and your job is to kill vampires, werewolves, zombies and other nightmarish creatures that haunt the west. Use a variety of punches, melee weapons, guns and an electric whip to crush your enemies and send those demons back to Hell where they belong.
This game had a lot of promise at first. Sure, it’s covered in two pounds of Unreal Engine 5 grease. It looks so blurry that it made me think my glasses were missing their lenses, the graphics are browner than my toilet after I gorged myself on discounted sushi and everything has that iconic Unreal Engine 5 shape where it looks like it’s made from melted plastic, but the gameplay felt good.
Hits were impactful, with a lot of hitstun, attacks had a good reach to them, movement was good and it let you dodge out of attacks just by moving. There was very little tracking on attacks, so you could actually out-space them, you could throw enemies around like rag dolls and there were some fun crowd control options.
Combat encounters were well designed. A good mix of ranged enemies with melee enemies, flying enemies to keep you focused on the sky while threats come at you from the ground, big guys thrown in with small fry to keep you distracted. Things like that. Purposeful enemy placement. Some good stuff.
If I’m singing this game’s praises, why do I have it in the article about flushed games?
Well, much like Slave Zero X, this starts out okay, then I find something that invalidates the game. In this case, it’s the electric gauntlet.
Shock Me Like an Electric Eel
A few minutes into the game you get the electric gauntlet, the thing the guy is wearing on the cover of the game. This leash takes anything the game had been building and stomps it into the ground. Once you get it, you gain access to a parry, some other stuff and the whip. Everything other than the whip is irrelevant. There is only the whip. The whip is above all. It’s not just better than anything the gauntlet offers, it’s better than anything else in your entire arsenal.
The game exists in two phases: before the whip, and after the whip. Before the whip, you have to shoot flying enemies with your gun. That means finding a break from fighting the melee enemies to ready your gun, aim and shoot. After the whip, you can pull those suckers out of the sky and kill them instantly. Before the whip, you had to respect spacing and move around your enemies. Find an advantageous position to fight from so you wouldn’t get surrounded. After the whip: grab any enemy, pull them towards you and just kill them. Is another enemy getting close while you’re killing the first? Grab him and kill him, too!
The whip is a leash that grabs an enemy, from incredible distances, brings them to you and stuns them. From there you can punch them and kill them. This attack has no cooldown, it isn’t tied to a meter, and there’s no ammo for it. It’s a free grappling hook that stuns enemies. It plays the game for you. You don’t have to do anything other than pull with the leash. Sure, you can’t use it on the bosses, but who cares? I don’t. I didn’t get that far into the game. The leash grabbed my attention at first, but then it stunned it and killed it. Any positive thought I had about the game vanished in an instant, and it was replaced by the whip.
I don’t recommend the electric whip- I mean- Evil West. It’s an okay action game that has some good ideas, that are all superseded by the whip. If you can still find some fun in this game without using the whip, I have a bridge to sell you, too.
Here it is in action, with special musical guest: the guy from Puddle of Mudd.
Refunds
I don’t like to refund games. Steam has a policy where it won’t offer a refund if you play a game for more than two hours, and to determine if I actually dislike a game, I’ll play it for a lot longer, even if I’m not having fun, just to make sure the game sucks. I spent seven hours with Gungrave G.O.R.E., which is seven hours longer than anyone should play that game, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. I tried playing it on normal, on hard, using all the mechanics, engaging with the game on its terms, trying to exploit it, looking for any hidden mechanics. I didn’t find anything, the game wasn’t improving, so I stopped playing it. I can see if I’m going to like a game pretty early on, but I keep at it to see if there’s anything to gain from it. If it sucks, I can usually get a review out of it, at least.
I’m especially stubborn when it comes to refunding indie games. They’re usually helmed by one or two developers and maybe a few helpers. Any sale goes to them, and not some slop factory like Ubisoft or Blizzard. All things considered, I didn’t hesitate when it came to refunding Slave Zero X. When I discovered you could cheese the game, my enjoyment of it vanished and I felt legitimately bad for spending money on it. I got the special edition, and even though I got it on sale, I felt like I had wasted that money.
I didn’t refund Evil West because I played it on Gamepass, but even then I didn’t think it was worth the hard drive space, so I deleted it. I didn’t want to spend God knows how many hours spamming the electric gauntlet to stunlock enemies and beat them down. That’s not my idea of fun.
But Roger, what if…
But Roger, what if you play the game the way the developers intended?
That’s a good question, but I think that the way I played was how the developers intended. Think about it. Slave Zero X shipped with that burst/Devil Trigger loop. It’s a very obvious interaction. If the developer didn’t want players to spam it, it wouldn’t be in the game. You wouldn’t get a free burst just by using Devil Trigger. The number of enemies and how often they juggle you is another indicator that you’re supposed to play like that. Same thing with Evil West. If the developers didn’t want me to spam the whip, they would have limited it somehow. They wouldn’t have made it so powerful; it wouldn’t reach across an entire arena, it wouldn’t instantly kill most things. The game isn’t hard enough to require something so overpowered. The rest of the game uses cooldowns, which I hate, but they clearly limit your tools. Same thing with ammo, or any other resource like a meter. Other tools in Evil West have this limitation, but not the whip.
What if you play the game without those things, for more fun?
I only put in as much work as the game lets me. If I can get through it playing like a chimp, I will, I won’t have any fun, and I’ll throw the game into the trash.
What if you want to turn your brain off and play something simple? You see, not everyone plays games for a challenge. Maybe I just want to decompress and press a few buttons and drool-
That’s fun for you, but I’m not spending money on something to waste my time. I know that’s a funny thing to say about videogames, which are inherently a waste of time, but there’s a difference between wasting time having fun and wasting time doing nothing. This section is here because I’ve seen this argument used to defend games like this. If you want to turn your brain off so much, you should try to find the cause of that. It sure as hell isn’t because you use it too much.
Conclusion
Stop making games that are easily solved. If even I can find the path of least resistance, you dun goofed. I don’t recommend either game.
Now, about that bridge…