Recent reviews by Da Queen

I had to think very carefully about giving Katana Zero a Not Recommended, because every moment I had with this game rolling around and deflecting bullets was a satisfying experience. Go read any of the thousands of reviews talking about how smooth and satisfying the gameplay is if you want to hear about that, and if a short but very tight 3-4 hour gameplay experience with a solid soundtrack is what you are looking for and nothing else, go buy this game. But I want to talk about the story and how it diminishes the impact of the entire game.

Katana Zero has all of the components of a great neo-noir cyberpunk story-- a believable, if generic setting, a brooding, violent protagonist, a scummy city full of bright lights and horrible people, and the feeling that not all is as it appears. Your meetings with your 'psychiatrist' slowly take on a sinister tone, your character's nightmares get more and more vivid, it is implied that you will have to make some kind of important choice, and so on and so on. The buildup is very well done, and matches with the escalation in gameplay. Then the story just... ends. This is my first criticism of Katana Zero, and the one I want to get out of the way because it is obvious that the game is not yet complete-- the final chapter is explicitly unfinished and trying to play it just has the game prompt you to 'come back in a few months'. However, it is extremely unlikely that a single extra level will resolve the issues with the narrative and pacing.

!!SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!!

Katana Zero's narrative is reliant on snap cuts between mundanity, grim violence, and hallucinatory madness. Every night after engaging in wanton slaughter at the behest of his 'psychiatrist', the unnamed main character, referred to by the authorities as The Dragon, returns to his grubby single-room apartment to have herbal tea and fall asleep on the couch. He is then plagued by vague and menacing nightmares, before returning to the psychiatrist's office to receive a dose of 'medicine' and his next contract. This cycle is repeated just enough times for you to start to feel familiar with it, with the intention of making the game's later moments feel shocking and subversive in comparison. The execution of these moments feels somewhat cheap, however, as the way that the game breaks the cycle is just to utilise a glitch effect followed by a smash-cut to a completely different scene.

Soon he's joined by a small girl whose father lives next door. She is presented in an incredibly sickly-sweet manner , sticks out like a sore thumb in the grubby, dangerous city, and it is obvious that she is supposed to be the Dragon's morality ball. He comes to care for her and tolerate her presence in a painfully predictable way. Almost as predictable as the fact that the story ends with her disappearance, and the implication that she may never have been real anyway. Many elements of the game's story fall into these extremely tropey patterns.

The only vaguely interesting elements of the story come from the Men in Masks, who are presented as the central figures of intrigue for much of the story's run. They appear to the Dragon in his sleep, fluctuating between Shakespearean rhetoric and depraved taunting as they tell him that he will be Judged for his actions and shall have to make a grave decision, along with a lot of veiled references to the Dragon's murky past in the war. These scenes are presented in a way which is obviously intending to weave intrigue and mystery into the story. However, it takes more than a pair of walking vague statement generators to make a story ambiguous in a way that makes sense. The 'decision' that the Dragon ends up making is quite literally 'do you want to die right now or not', with the vague implication that choosing to live will have Dire Consequences down the road. And that's... it. Despite how every chapter opens with a Majora's Mask-style countdown of the number of days until your 'JUDGEMENT', once it happened, and once the story did absolutely nothing with it thereafter, it seemed a little ridiculous.

Much of what transpires and what is *actually* revealed in the story is painfully predictable and could be transplanted from any 'secret government super soldier' story ever written, as is the conclusion to the Dragon's nightmares-- once you learn he was in the war, the fact that the 'dreams' are actually flashbacks is pretty much a given, as is the final twist reveal.

I know that picking at the story in a game like this which is gameplay-focused and doesn't pretend to be anything else seems like a shaky basis for a Not Recommended, but I feel like when games try to present stories which are clever and subversive, we should hold them to higher standards.

I picked up this game with almost no context. I saw an article on some gaming website about it, thought it looked pretty, and bought it. And that is why 100% of people will buy this game; it looks incredible. You don't need a review to tell you that. The art style and every aspect of the execution is truly gorgeous, with every chapter having very different visuals, from colour palette to assets. Almost every mechanic in the game is geared towards showcasing just how beautiful a game they made; vents in the floor do nothing but release more species of fish to swim around, statues allow you to 'meditate' and look at the underwater landscape from a fish's point of view... It's all very well done, although very graphics-heavy given how they went for a pseudo cel-shaded look, as the huge amount of fish on screen at any one moment can often tax your PC quite heavily. Many moments are truly breathtaking; swimming in a jet stream with schools of fish all around you, swimming alongside blue whales, and watching sections of the ocean come to life as you restore them.

The control scheme is possibly one of the most satisfying implementations of swimming ever; moving is fluid (lol), your character looks graceful and feels excellent to move with. There are the odd niggly moments where they'll veer in a direction you didn't intend, but this happens very rarely. Jumping out of the water like a dolphin is great fun.

The music is also excellent; a full orchestral and choral score that really enhances the experience, yet isn't intrusive. It isn't quite atmospheric, but goes a little further than that, and makes the game's more beautiful moments just that little bit more jawdropping.

Now for the parts they didn't do so well. The game has practically no plot, which is not necessarily a bad thing at all, but what little they did include feels stilted and too minimal to be worth anything-- about halfway into the game you'll start encountering these tetrahedron shaped things which act like depth charges, they'll make a menacing sound when you get near and will zap you. These guys are the 'villains'. Yeah. But because the game doesn't have a life meter, or any way to die, the 'threat' these things are supposed to pose is actually non existent. The parts of the game where you have to navigate through fields of these things may as well not be there, as you can bump into as many as you want with no penalty other than slowing down. Honestly, it just feels like an attempt to introduce something other than swimming and fish, and it doesn't quite work.

Early on you will encounter little floating bots that you activate and will follow you around. They're required to progress as they remove coral walls for you, but having them floating around constantly is incredibly annoying and detracts from the nice feeling of swimming around with the fish. They soon disappear after the halfway point, but they are an annoyance whilst they're there.

Finally, the length. This is a two hour game, and once you've experienced everything the game has there's not much incentive to go again. There are a couple of collectibles in the form of shells, I'm not sure what they do (I'm fairly sure I didn't get all of them the first time) but really not enough to make me want to go back again immediately. Perhaps once some time has passed I'll get something more out of it, but I doubt it. Again, not a bad thing, but with a £15 asking price, is it worth it?

Maybe. This certainly is an extremely artistic game, with the emphasis on the 'artistic' part. The gameplay doesn't stretch any further than swimming from point A to point B, but this is a game that really is about the adventure. The feeling that this game gives you, a truly childlike sense of wonder and freedom, really does have to be played to be fully understood. This game truly is a memorable gem, even if that memory is a little short.