MOTORSLICE comes close to being a good game, but too many frustrations and missed opportunities popped up in almost every chapter of my playthrough, which soiled the overall experience.

The biggest thing I can compliment this game on is its overall level design and natural feeling interconnectivity. Early in the game, you realize you can see every area from the post-boss traversal sections you navigate through. At the start, you can look up at everything ahead of you in your journey and as you progress, you can look down and see all the areas you’ve already completed. It’s a very cool aspect of the game that couldn’t have been easy to implement, so props to the team for making it work.

I also really love the general art style and music they went with here. It creates a great vibe that feels wholly unique. And with the buttery smooth animations

When everything’s working as intended, the parkour in this game feels great. Sliding under pipes, wall running, swinging from pipes, and a few other traversal tricks are all great elements that the devs use well to craft a good variety of platforming puzzles. The main issue is that these sequences rarely play out as you want them to. I couldn’t tell you how many times I wanted to run vertically up a wall only for the character to inexplicably start a wall run that would inevitably kill her. It happened dozens of times through my playthrough at least and it happened more and more as the platforming sections became more demanding throughout the game. I don’t think there was a single area in the game where there wasn’t at least one instance of the character just not doing what I clearly wanted her to do.

The motorslice technique, for example, should feel like the best move in the game and it’s a shame that actually pulling it off can be very unwieldy. At one point, they stop you for a brief cutscene that introduces the concept of swapping direction mid-motorslice to navigate more complex arrangements. At first, I felt relieved that they were about to give me a dedicated button that would make traversing these sections much more manageable. Instead, they tell you to just let go of the button when you want to change direction and reorient yourself to where you want to go next. It feels really bad. From this point on, I ran into countless instances where I wanted to go right but ended up going up, and vice versa. Managing your inertia while fighting the camera and trying to precisely aim the angle you want to go in just sucks and it’s hard to imagine there couldn’t have been a better way of going about it.

The boss fights really should have been the showstoppers in this game. Big Shadow of the Colossus showdowns with various big rigs and heavy machinery seem like they would work perfectly in a game built around parkour flow states. While I applaud the devs for designing completely unique boss encounters for each biome (I would have bet we would get a boss reskin or straight-up boss reuse at some point during the playthrough), I found myself getting the most frustrated during these encounters and it just got worse and worse as I progressed through the game. I found that these fights either had lackluster mechanics, super aggravating platforming sections, unforgiving checkpoints, or a combination of all 3. There were a few standout moments that felt cool to pull off, but the vast majority was just a massive slog to push through.

Outside of boss battles, the general combat was very one dimensional. Sure, parrying a projectile and slapping it back at enemies is kind of fun the first few times, but by the halfway point, you’ve been introduced to the 3 enemy varieties, and it’s just rinse and repeat to a nauseating degree.

At first, I was really happy to see the addition of these orbs that acted as optional collectibles in each area. It was solid enough incentive to go out of my way to explore a hidden area or attempt a challenging platforming section. Unfortunately I think their decision to go the Celeste-like route where you need to stay alive for a certain amount of time after you collect them was the wrong one. There were a few instances early on in the game where I had collected three orbs, ended up dying (probably due to some platforming gone wrong) and got sent back to a checkpoint where I would need to run around the entire place again just to pick them up. Once they introduced the timed segments where they wanted you to collect multiple orbs in a row to keep the timer going, I completely gave up on going for these and just stuck to the main path for the rest of my playthrough.

The story and dialogue here are pretty minimal, but what’s here kind of has weird, creepy, and horny undertones and is conveyed with about as much nuance as an anti social Redditor. It kind of feels like they were going for a Nier angle, but it just comes off as thirsting for this anime girl.

All of this is bundled with an extremely lackluster ending that I guess is setting up a sequel of sorts? Who’s to know, but I won’t be coming back to this series any time soon to find out.

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