I recently put out a video review of this game, which you can find at the bottom. The script is below.
At its core, Katana Zero is an adrenaline rush. A door-smashing, blade-slashing, heart-crashing dose of excitement injected into a 2D action platformer that’s tough to put down.
This indie project by one-man developer Askiisoft places you in control of a young swordsman who is given a drug that bestows time-bending powers and tasked with carrying out a series of hits for a mysterious employer. As you slash your way through neon-lit alleys, lofty penthouses and guarded compounds, you guide this wayward assassin to learn more about himself and the role he plays in a much larger machine — while racking up quite the body count along the way.
Hit and run
Katana Zero’s levels are divided into rooms that each present their own challenge to be cleared. The rules are simple: hit enemies once, and they die. If they hit you once, you die. Your task: leave no survivors.
To accomplish this, you have a katana, which can be swung in eight directions and carries you a decent bit when in midair, a dodge roll, which can be canceled early to perform a slash or jump, and pickups, which are mostly projectiles to be thrown at enemies. You can also deflect bullets back at baddies with a swing of the sword or slow down time to make a difficult maneuver a good deal easier, though this power is on a strict cooldown.
Most rooms take only a matter of seconds to complete, if you can survive that long. While the game usually sticks to its own rules and keeps things fair, it’s still quite challenging. But thankfully, restarts are almost instantaneous, sending you back into the fray with the same speed used to plaster enemies against the walls.
The one-hit kill, though not original to Katana Zero, is executed here with a visceral satisfaction. It’s the heart and soul of a gameplay loop that feeds into the concept of a master assassin at the peak of his abilities.
And it just feels good. Game critic Jim Sterling described another indie title, Dead Cells, as a game that “makes you feel good at it even if you’re not very good at it,” and that sentiment certainly applies to Katana Zero. Dealing instant death in a fast-paced series of tight maneuvers is a gratifying sensation, even when it comes after dozens of failed attempts.
Puzzling it out
The one-hit kill is partnered with smart enemy and level designs to prevent things from going stale. Knife-wielding enemies can block your front-facing attacks with their own if your timing is off, riot shields demand a roundabout approach, shotguns encourage you to get in quick, and so on.
Even more important than the enemies is the environments in which they’re strategically placed. You can’t just run in a straight line and cut people down in Katana Zero if you want to live. You have to approach with a combination of speed and tactical thinking.
And that’s where your character’s precognition ability comes in. When you fail, you’re not actually dying — it’s simply the swordsman looking ahead into the future and seeing that your course of action won’t work.
This isn’t just an interesting thematic presentation — it’s a representation of what the player must do to survive.
In order to clear a room, you must first solve the puzzle the environment presents. Which entrance should you take into that section of the room? What enemy needs to die first? Who should you use your throwing item on? Each attempt tells you more about what is needed to succeed.
In this respect, I found myself seeing many similarities between Katana Zero and the stellar 2018 platformer Celeste.
While both games put you through a series of blazing fast, self-contained challenges in room after room after room, they’re not just testing your reaction time or ability to hit the right buttons. They’re also testing your ability to, through experimentation, piece together the best way forward in your mind.
That’s why such rapid restarts are critically important in both titles. Dying isn’t a failure, it’s a crucial vehicle for gathering information.
These titles begin each challenge as puzzle games, and once solved, test your ability to actually execute the solution. That try, die, learn, adapt, try again loop is the structure that keeps the satisfaction of the one-hit kill alive and kicking long enough to enjoy Katana Zero from start to finish.
Take a break?
Katana Zero’s addictively intense and surprisingly tactical gameplay is delivered in bursts, strung together by slower storytelling segments to let you catch your breath.
Your young samurai regularly interacts with his psychiatrist and people in his neighborhood through real-time dialogue choices that come with the interesting ability to interrupt them entirely. Ultimately though, most of your decisions do not affect the story in meaningful ways, and you end up going toward the same destination one way or another.
The major plot elements, which I won’t mention in more detail to avoid spoilers, tread some pretty familiar ground, but they’re still mixed together in a way that comes out to a fairly fresh experience, though a pretty vague one at times. From what I understand, there’s supposed to be DLC on its way that will deliver more answers on the story, so I’ll reserve judgment.
However, the biggest flaw in Katana Zero that I cannot so easily excuse is its pacing.
The storytelling segments, while interesting, are delivered in an imbalanced manner compared to the gameplay portion, especially throughout the first half of the game’s runtime. The initial levels are too short to build any good momentum, and are then interrupted by longer story sections that wind up being more frustrating than engaging.
To help illustrate this, I went back to the footage of my first playthrough and timed each segment. At one point, I go through 10 straight minutes of dialogue and cutscenes, followed by a quick 2 minutes of gameplay, and then another 10 minutes of scenes.
While breaking up levels with some interesting exposition isn’t a bad idea, letting the player breathe goes too far when they’re out of the action for longer than they were in it.
In the early levels, I would just begin to approach a point where I felt like I had the flow of the gameplay down, and right then I’d hit the end of the level and have to put all that I had learned aside for what felt in the moment like a very long time.
For a game that is an absolute thrill ride when control is in your hands, it was a little disappointing to see Katana Zero be rather stingy with that control at times. This does ease up a bit in the latter portions of the game, but it was enough of a problem early on to detract from my experience somewhat.
Luckily, once you beat the game the first time, the newly unlocked Speedrun Mode does away with this issue entirely. With the right settings, you can play through each level or the entire game without any of the story segments getting in the way — nothing but action as you practice your skills. This mode suits Katana Zero perfectly since it’s at its best when you’re cutting down enemies as fast as possible.
That, combined with a harder difficulty setting and unlockable weapons that behave in different ways, helps extend Katana Zero’s shelf life significantly, even if parts of the initial playthrough stumbled a bit.
Final remarks
Like countless other titles with big aspirations, Katana Zero is at its worst when it tries to get away from what it’s good at, its big selling point. In this case, that’s fast-paced, explosive platforming combat action.
Everything else, like poorly paced story delivery — or that obligatory stealth section that absolutely no one asked for — just gets in the way.
Despite those faltering moments, Katana Zero is absolutely a worthwhile pickup, thanks to a gameplay hook that combines a satisfying one-hit kill with a subtle depth of tactics to produce an experience that won’t soon be forgotten.
Scoring time
For a final score, I consider what I call Personal Points and Practical Points.
Essentially Personal Points are a pure indication of how much fun the game was to play, while Practical Points measure how well the elements of the game’s design were executed compared to their potential.
You could call Personal Points the more subjective of the two, with Practical Points being my closest attempt at objectivity.
Katana Zero gets an 8 out of 10 Personal Points. This game was a blast, weighed down by just a handful of frustrations along the way.
On the Practical scale, it’s only a little worse, settling in at a 7.5 out of 10. Katana Zero’s strengths are incredibly strong, but some more fine-tuning in other areas could have created a more consistently great experience.
Considering those two metrics, at the end of the day I have to give Katana Zero an 8 out of 10 overall. If you like what you've read, Katana Zero is definitely worth the time and price investment.
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