Katana Zero is a fast paced action platformer developed by Akiisoft. Set in an 80´s cyberpunk-neon city, we play as a hitman Samurai with a special perception of time and suffering from a memory loss condition, which allows for exciting instant-death combat with a bullet-time element that will be key in order to carry on each mission.

Story and Character development
I am going to be quite brief on this aspect of the game, since everything is shrouded in mystery, every hint I give might be a hint that you might not experience and that is just unfair.
What I want to focus on is the delivery of this story, because it truly is for everyone, do you want to just skip conversations and move on with the game? Largely, you can do that. Do you prefer, on the other hand, to explore the conversations and role play each scenario to see where each lead takes you? Perfect!, you also can do that.
The story is delivered in a very special way, with bits and pieces that the game allows you to tie together uncovering the past that not even the main character knows he has. Even though I love the way the game makes me want to uncover the truth, and how much I liked the delivery of the fairly grim narrative I believe in the end it falls slightly short for the expectations that the game has been building up to. I would argue that, while not being bad per se, the writing is the weakest part of the game.

Art and music
Katana Zero is easily one of my favourite modern pixel art games that I have played over the past year. There is this amazing attention to detail on each animation, with every bit falling into the VHS theme and the nature of the scene you are watching.
I think what surprised me the most was the lighting, I did not expect high quality lights being put here and there and even though the blue and pink gradients on the hit animations, or during the bullet time are beautiful and feel awesome (especially the second you deflect a bullet), there is something about the elegant lighting that this game shows at any given time that made me fall in love with it.

The music is not behind, made by Ludowic and Bill Kiley, it has a special protagonism, with each level starting with you pressing “play” on your walkman the music does not only feel that is good for the general feel of the level, but something to be enjoyed while carrying out the missions as the main character.

Gameplay
Katana zero has incredibly fluid controls and combat, starts a little bit slow, but after the first few levels it starts to ramp up the difficulty until every encounter starts feeling more like a puzzle than combat due to the trial and error nature of it. The combat allows for a lot of expression, the katana slashes can be directed on specific directions, and the invulnerability while can be creatively abused to get within slashing range a lot of the time.
My main issue with combat is not what you can do really, I love how it feels, i love how it looks, I love how the game approaches failure as if the level you played was just a complicated plan happening in your head and only when you find that successful strategy, you can move forward. My main issue with the combat are the enemies. There are just a handful of enemies that perform one specific attack, so it is really consistent in the way you approach each situation, but it can get repetitive. There is no surprise to it, the knife guy will always cross knives with you and put your slashing ability on cooldown unless you dodge it, the shotgun guy can´t be deflected, but you can dodge it with the roll etc…
This reinforces the “puzzle” feeling of each complex scenario, since every enemy behaves the same and there are only two or three enemy types on the screen at any given encounter, it’s more about finding the right way to overcome the scenario than it is about outmaneuvering your opponents even though there are more than one or two ways of approaching each situation.

Menus and accesibility
Due to the VHS theme and the intense effects we are given a lot of options for people that suffer from seizures, you can disable entire effects and shaders like the rewind FX that you get on death, the screen shake or the hit pause that can be a little bit too much at times.
There are remappable controls, with the ability to assign more than one key to each movement, and good details like being able to change how we activate the bullet time effect from a “hold” to a “tap”. You can modify the response time and the text speed, but there are no further difficulty settings beyond the default and harder ones. The bullet time effect can be handy to make the game a more adequate experience for people that can’t keep up with the default fast pace, but sometimes it might prove not enough for some players towards the end of the game, when encounters are longer and the meter ends before you can finish each enemy off.

Conclussion
I recommend Katana Zero to anyone that loves this blend of fast-paced game, I think its fun, enjoyable, very speedrunnable if you are into that, and that tells a nice story filled with memorable moments both narrative and gameplay wise.

This is a copy of my Medium Review[medium.com].