Slave Zero

Great action. Amazing soundtrack. Super fun. Played this game in the 1999, it's still pretty good. Hard to get working on modern hardware/OS. A little jank on clipping.

One of the most fun Mech shooters, I've ever played, its oozing in atmosphere, and the gameplay is so addicting, can't recommend this enough

I'm generally a harsh critic with older games that I hadn't played back when they were new, and even when revisiting something 15 or 20 years old I'm usually a lot less impressed with it than I was when I first played it. It's so bad that I see a title like Slave Zero in my library and groan, knowing this was a waste of money when I picked it up years ago thinking it might run on the computer I had then, not yet knowing that once I built a more modern gaming computer I would be pre-occupied with the fancy stuff (sometimes only by comparison to the old crap) that companies were releasing in the 2010's or beyond. That's if it even worked, which most of the old games I try don't. So imagine my surprise when Slave Zero works as is (mostly), no messing around or trouble shooting needed, on my system and it absolutely rules. The movement feels so good, the combat is basic but still fun, the overall world and character design is cool as hell, the soundtrack is great for this sort of thing and the controls are simple enough I picked up on them intuitively. That was another point of worry, I was a console kid and never bothered learning how to properly use mouse and keyboard, so any games that don't work with controllers can often cause me problems. Just too many keys to try and remember. Here it couldn't be simpler, except for the jump button. The jump button is the E key for some stupid reason, and I don't think I saw that listed on the controls page in settings. I didn't think there was a jump button because of that, googled what it was after watching a playthrough of the mission I'd been stuck on due to not knowing how to jump, and seeing the person playing was clearly jumping. Google was useless and I had to figure out which key it was for myself, so now you know. It's not all perfect though, there's some lag by the time you get to the sewer missions and the difficulty spike in mission 5 or 6 is kind of stupid. There's a boss fight where half the battle is doing some platforming so you don't fall into an instant death pool, while trying to damage the boss. I don't think that was very good game design. It was at this point I actually decided that trying to finish the game wasn't worth my time, yet I still think the game deserves a positive review. Additionally, the crosshair isn't accurate unless you play on a lower resolution setting, however I think you can work around that just by getting a feel for the game. The last issue I have is that there aren't any subtitles, and the audio mixing kind of sucks so you're gonna miss some dialogue. Overall, considering its age this is still a really good game and well worth it for a deeply discounted price, if you don't mind either giving up when it stops being fun or you don't mind potentially dozens of tries once it gets hard.