GordonJAGReview Motorslice Review

I always have a soft spot for solo developers, or at least very small development teams. There’s just something interesting about seeing someone’s uncompromised vision of what they want their game to be. If something doesn’t make any sense to you, you can easily come away from the experience knowing that it made perfect sense to someone. Motorslice doesn’t quite get to absurd levels of moon logic, but there is a lot in this game that left me feeling like I was watching someone’s...fantasies being played out through a thick glass wall without enough care for other core elements of game design, and I’m going to get the things I think are weird out of the way first. I won’t say Motorslice ever feels like it’s going into full fetish territory, but we’re definitely skirting around it. The main character—Slicer P—is a cute, emotionless anime girl with a rack and a backside that the camera just loves to zoom in on. So far, that’s hardly uncommon when it comes to a lot of female character design, and it doesn't inherently bother me. But when the “slacker” scenes—brief interactable cutscenes between you and P—come up, I can’t help but feel like some of it is shoehorned in for the sake of being purely for the developers. When I enter one of these scenes, and the camera is trying to tunnel up P’s backside, zoom in on her bare feet, or give a close-up of her cleavage in her sports bra, it does make for a tonal clash after I just ran through a harrowing gauntlet of killer industrial equipment. It’s a little strange because the game is pretty ungoonerified outside of those slacker scenes. Beyond some jiggle physics, there isn’t too much that’s deliberately goonerified about P in standard gameplay. She doesn’t have a flirty personality, and it never feels like she’s “in” on the whole gooner thing in the slacker scenes, which might be why it feels kind of weird to me. No one’s going to mistake P for Bayonetta, that’s for sure, and that does make it all the more strange why some of your “dialogue” options are things like sniffing P’s bare feet. If you want to have a gooner character, be my guest, but at least make it consistently gooner in tone. Another thing that makes me feel like I’m skirting around someone’s fetish is the gore. There are no human enemies in the game, so when you cut them apart, it doesn’t feel overly violent until you get killed. P dies in one hit from most enemies, usually in a messy explosion of limbs and a decapitated head, and there can be some trial and error to the combat, so you might be seeing P become a gory mess of limbs and a head often. The flash of gore only lasts for about half a second, but what’s happening is clear, and it feels so strange in a game that doesn’t otherwise feel about that. In the same way that no one is mistaking P for Bayonetta, no one is mistaking Motorslice for Mortal Kombat, so it is a little weird when the cute anime girl detonates into a pile of meat. But with that out of the way, I can fully get off my soapbox and move to things like narrative and overall gameplay, and Motorslice has its struggles in those areas as well. The narrative isn’t much to write home about. You’re dumped into this gigantic megastructure with the instructions to kill all the machines inside, and you’re left to piece together the story and context through P’s slacker scenes and the environment. Generally, minimalist storytelling can work very well, and environmental storytelling can absolutely work, but Motorslice falls more than a little short on just about every storytelling front. The direct narrative doesn’t really evolve much past just killing every machine you come across until you get to the end of the game. The goal never changes, and motivations are never really fleshed out or expanded upon. P herself doesn’t get much characterization either, even during those slacker scenes. In those scenes, she doesn’t have much interesting to say about herself or the situation around her. She may comment a little on her progress or the megastructure itself, but those little bits of story and character never go anywhere of substance, and as mean as it may sound, I don’t think that the developers quite had the chops to tell a story without many words. Which is a shame, because I was interested in exploring the megastructure and learning its secrets. For all of the story and character faults, the megastructure is an awesome setting for the game. It’s a massive, twisting beast of living machinery, and its sense of scale is utilized well throughout the game. You constantly get great views as you ascend, letting you see down to areas that you just went through. It does a great job emphasizing that element of game progress through visuals, which I like. It just bums me out because that same method could have been used to tell an interesting story through the game’s good visual design. The megastructure itself makes for a solid enough foundation for the gameplay, which is primarily based in traversal with the occasional combat section thrown in. You do a lot of running, jumping, sliding, climbing, wall running, and motorslicing—the movement tech given to P by her chainsaw sword that allows her to essentially grind across certain surfaces—to navigate the megastructure. At the start, I really enjoyed the core gameplay loop, and I thought its strengths were paced well. There’s just something extremely satisfying about being this small person running, jumping, and chainsawing her way across this incomprehensibly large machine. Where it starts to fall apart a bit is once the motorslicing aspect becomes more involved, particularly when the game wants you to change direction. Legitimately, when I was playing, it successfully worked maybe 70% of the time. I would find a relatively safe space to test it, I wouldn’t change anything with the input, and I could never quite get the whole thing to fully behave as it should have. A core movement mechanic in a game primarily about moving has to work consistently, and the motorslicing just didn’t. It was bad enough that I was close to dropping the game entirely. It goes without saying, but that’s not a good thing. Not helping the inconsistent mechanical issues were the boss fights. Visually, the boss fights were impressive, as they do a great job of providing a sense of scale. But since the boss fights were basically repeated movement challenges, if the movement mechanics messed up, that meant I got to enjoy the sight of P getting squished into hamburger meat for the billionth time. Conceptually, these fights were cool, but the gameplay needed to be tighter for the whole thing to work properly. The cool spectacle of taking down a massive piece of machinery lost its charm after P exploded because she decided to motorslice into grinding cog wheels instead of going in the direction I told her to go. While I do feel negatively about Motorslice as a whole, there is a cool game idea in here, and I do appreciate its atmospheric, minimalist, and liminal art direction and design. Unfortunately, Motorslice just can’t make the most of its positive traits when it’s constantly letting itself down with a nonexistent story, barely there characters, and gameplay that gradually begins to frustrate more than entertain. While I don’t hate the game, if someone asked me what I would recommend about it to them, I would be at a bit of a loss. I don’t know if Motorslice necessarily needed more time in the oven as much as it needed tighter design and a better shift of focus. Maybe less time should have been spent on zooming in on P’s feet and cleavage, or figuring out different ways you can splatter her into goop, and more time should have been spent on making her a compelling character with an interesting story. Oh, and gameplay that didn’t have me rooting for the machines toward the end would have been super.