I had been anticipating MOTORSLICE for quite a while, which meant I was pretty stoked upon receiving a review copy. Even though I found the gameplay loop to be just okay, it’s the world that drew me in and kept me totally hooked.
MOTORSLICE is an action-adventure game utilizing hack-and-slash and parkour elements, the second game of the indie team Regular Studio. The team directly attributes inspiration from parkour games like Prince of Persia and Mirror’s Edge, though I got some vibes from the Portal series as I played through this roughly ten-hour story.
You follow P, a Slicer, as a drone she finds named Orbie. While you directly control P, the camera movements are all explained away as Orbie hovering around P and observing her. Ahh- I always love games that integrate normal gameplay features as in-lore features. P is tasked by some mysterious organization of other Slicers to infiltrate “the Megastructure” and destroy every machine inside.
This review can’t start on any topic other than MOTORSLICE‘s world because holy moly is it breathtaking. When P first entered the Megastructure after the tutorial, I was instantly hooked, because I knew just about everything I could see in front, around, and above me were locations the game was going to take us.
My all-time favourite game, Dark Souls, does the exact same thing, where you can see both future and past locations from almost anywhere you go. Despite the game being low-poly with simple terrain textures, the endless bizarre architecture takes your eyes on a journey. This just goes to show that Unreal Engine 5 doesn’t need to be used to render realistic graphics for a game to totally blow you away with its visuals.
It never gets old either. Each area adds a certain flair or emulates an aspect of the brutalist landscape that the previous ones didn’t, from simple open walkways to tight steel corridors, to mysterious blocky rooms seemingly carved out of stone. I also love the game for ending each chapter with a trip higher up a single spire that stretches up past the clouds and out of view, each level of the Megastructure connecting back to this central point.
To get around these sprawling liminal landscapes, you’ll be engaging in several parkour challenges and puzzles. You have some pretty standard parkour features like wall running and vaulting, but you also have the sick Motorslice feature, where P drives her chainsaw into certain metal surfaces and activates it to ride along the wall.
Apart from just being a metal way to get around the map, Motorslicing is also used for defeating the game’s colossal bosses that guard the end of each chapter. Your main way of dealing with bosses is to climb onto them and find areas to Motorslice, causing sections of their health bar to deteriorate as you slice into different vulnerable areas.
While these battles are a great way to cap off what you learned from the chapter up to this point, some of them feel a bit stiff. Most attacks from bosses can be parried, with each time you do this feeling straight out of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, but other than that, you don’t really interact with the boss outside of slicing them up, treating them more like another parkour course.
Something I thought could have been neat were moments where P needed to leap off the boss at the end of certain Motorslice, causing the boss to change its movement patterns and making climbing back on just a bit more difficult before you got back to Motorslicing them to death.
The rest of the game is mainly parkour and keeping you on your toes, with most enemy placements serving more as ways to ensure you are reacting fast enough to your surroundings. Just about everything in the game kills P in one hit, but she also kills every non-boss in about one hit, too. This made the game feel much more about mastering your environment than just brute-forcing it with P’s chainsaw.
“While I love games that respect themselves enough to keep secrets about their world, I think MOTORSLICE holds back just a little too much.
When P isn’t wall running, Motorslicing, or carving up machines, the game offers for you to take a break with her, instigating a cutscene with some cool (and sometimes a bit suggestive) shots of P in the environment. These sections are where you learn more about P and the world the game takes place in, typically touching on the Megastructure, Slicers, or the machines.
While I love games that respect themselves enough to keep secrets about their world, I think MOTORSLICE holds back just a little too much. There were so many things P mentioned that I wanted to learn more about, but by the end, I was just left to wonder without much to go on.
The game could maybe give you lore as you deploy drones, MOTORSLICE‘s version of collectibles. These little jerks either like to hide or sit in hard-to-reach areas and watch you as you struggle to reach them. The only function they have is protecting you from some killing blows from enemies, so I think giving tiny bites of lore as you collect more of them could have been a cool motivator to go out of your way to pursue them.
While MOTORSLICE is a largely fluid experience, I did encounter some bugs. The most game-breaking one I found was being put into a state where P could do nothing but walk and jitter around like she was in shock, which was only fixed by getting killed. Also, the first time I Motorsliced my chainsaw was facing the wrong way, and P was just gliding in the air, which took away from such a sick moment.
If MOTORSLICE took place in any other setting, I don’t know if the parkour loop would hook me. However, I love the Megastructure so much, and I was eager to power through some very frustrating parts just to reach the awe-inspiring end to it all. If you like challenging parkour games, and/or you’re even remotely interested in exploring the setting of MOTORSLICE, I would highly recommend giving it a try.
While I wish I could get more into the parkour system, I still think MOTORSLICE is a great experience. Yes, some of the parkour challenges can leave you wanting, especially some of the boss fights. Yes, there are many times where the game starts on about something cool in its lore and drops it. And yes, some of the scenes with P are a little cringey. However, no game does the Megastructure like MOTORSLICE does, and MOTORSLICE commits to selling you the journey of traversing this vast complex you won’t find anywhere else.
