Just for a change, we’ve got a remake of an old arcade game – but this time it’s a game I have never heard of.
Night Slashers: Remake is – shock, horror – a remake of the Night Slashers arcade game from 1993. From Storm Trident and Forever Entertainment this is – apparently – a remake of one of the best titles in the beat ’em up genre! A bold claim, and while fans of Final Fight and even Streets of Rage may have something to say about that statement, the fact remains that this is a well-regarded title.
But can transplanting it 30 years later and bringing it to a whole new audience bring the players in, or are we better off choosing another side-scrolling brawler?
The blurb for this game states that it is a “pulse-pounding, horror-themed beat ’em up game set in a nightmarish world filled with bloodthirsty creatures and unspeakable horrors,” which all sounds jolly nice. The story is the usual kind of throwaway nonsense, to be fair, involving the world being overrun by monsters from classic horror movies – werewolves, zombies, and vampires, oh my! Can you, as one of four operatives, use your kung fu skills to kick the monsters’ butts?
Well, taking the presentation of Night Slashers: Remake and the news is good. The art style is big, bold, and gory, with blood splashing liberally around as you punch monsters in the face. The characters and the foes they face are well designed, and a fourth character has actually been added just for this edition, which is always a welcome addition.
First impressions are very good then, but second and third impressions, not so much. The animation is a bit weird, see, as there don’t seem to be enough frames of animation for a lot of the movements. This is especially noticeable in the knockdown animation, where you seem to go from vertical to horizontal without any in-between frames. Other than this, the rest of the visuals are okay and have a sort of Saturday morning cartoon vibe.
Sound is another area where everything is fine, with the usual thumping fighting sound effects and solid voice acting for the four heroes and many of the villains, so the aural landscape is well-produced. All in all, apart from the animation, everything here is rosy in the garden.
So, what about the actual gameplay? Well, the first thing to mention is the multiplayer side. If you have a large collection of controllers and can squeeze three friends onto your couch, then you can all have a great time taking down the undead together. I’ve tested this in 2-player, and it all works very nicely, and as is usual with these types of games, it’s always more fun with more players.
The gameplay then follows the standard kind of side-scrolling beat ’em up tropes. We start at the left side of a stage, walk forward, fight a bunch of enemies until they are all dead, then rinse and repeat. The stages are broken up by a mid-level mini-boss, and then finally, the stage is rounded off by a big boss. Interestingly, these bosses are the only enemies to have a health bar, and you just have to keep hitting the rest of the enemies until they explode in a shower of blood and guts!
The challenge of Night Slashers: Remake is proper 90s as well – jolly hard, to put it politely. Once your lives are gone, that’s it – it is either a trip back to the main menu, or a trip back to the start of the stage you were on, and obviously, if you die on the stage boss, this can be a bit of a trek to get back to where you were going.
And the controls are a little bit on the odd side as well, with the jump and punch buttons not being where you’d expect them to be – Jump is B, and attack is A, for example. You can change these in the options menu, and I recommend that you do so, as it feels weird otherwise. The other thing I feel I need to draw your attention to is the brevity of the experience, as there are only seven stages to go at. This isn’t a surprise, given the source material, but I feel it could have been longer.
New features, apart from the new character, include some pretty pointless extra modifiers, such as exploding zombies and so on. Why you would need to make Night Slashers: Remake harder is beyond me, as it is more than hard enough as it is.
And so whilst Night Slashers: Remake is not the greatest beat ’em up in history, it does have a good shot at being one of the only horror-themed side-scrolling fighters on the market. If you fancy punching a vampire in the face, this is the game for you.
Can You Survive the Night Slashers: Remake? – https://www.thexboxhub.com/can-you-survive-the-night-slashers-remake/
Buy Night Slashers: Remake on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/night-slashers-remake/9p70sf054580