Motorslice review

Slicers have exactly one task: destroy all robots. Accompanied by an overseer orb, they enter ancient megastructures, explore the ruins, and make sure nothing mechanical is left intact; all for a decent paycheck at the end of the day. It's a dangerous job, but someone's got to do it, because failure is prohibited.

Motorslice is a PS5 game that looks like a PS1 game, plays like a PS2 game, and has the sensibilities of a PS3 game. Coming from me, most of that sentence is a huge compliment. This is an action platformer where you fight construction equipment with a chainsaw sword; what's not to love? While it can be pretty frustrating at times, Motorslice's highs are more than worth getting through its doldrums.

You play as P, a Slicer on the job who finds her latest task is way more than she bargained for. Still, a job's a job, so she gets to doing what she does best, while taking plenty of breaks along the way. There's really not much to Motorslice story-wise until the very end of the game and some lore drops along the way, as it's trying to be more of a slice-of-life plot. It's a strange way to approach this kind of game, but the gameplay was really what motivated me to continue here.

That's a good thing because what story is here isn't well written. Kira Buckland still gives an amazing performance as P even with the incorrect grammar and sentences that don't really connect to each other all the time. She plays it totally straight, so you can tell she's a consummate professional. The subject matter can be interesting... when it's not encouraging you to perv on P.

See, you don't only control P in Motorslice; the player is contextualized within the game as an AI within the overseer orb after P gets disconnected from her handler. The game will even credit your PSN ID as Orbie in the credits. As Orbie, you control the camera, turning on lights so P can see or blinking dirt and dust off of your lenses. It's all pretty cool and novel, until you get to the dialogue choices. Every so often, you can choose to "slack off" and have P take a break, monologuing to herself as she can't really understand all of Orbie's beep and boop responses. Some of these Slack Off scenes are nice breaks in the action, but a lot of them are weirdly objectifying of P. Like, I'm impressed you made a model for her taking off her boots or zipping down her jumpsuit, but also... why? I'm not a prude or anything and I adore P's design, I just don't feel like they added to P as a character, and frankly they made me dislike Orbie as your only two options in every scene are to be a corporate stooge and tell her to get back to work or ask her to step on you. I prefer it when games treat the player as if they are embodying the player character, and these things hindered that on both fronts. You can interact with P in some novel ways—like on the title screen, where if you bother her enough, she'll hit the quit button (which isn't there on PS5, but still restarts the game.)

Luckily, P feels incredible to control. From the moment you hit start, you've got access to all her parkour tricks and attacks, meaning the whole game is simply learning how to use those moves effectively, keep up your momentum, and avoid death. You've basically got three things you can do: jump, crouch, and slice. You can't jump very high, so you need to leverage the environment to get anywhere by wall jumping, grabbing onto a ledge before jumping for a boost, swinging on poles, wallrunning, and more.

While it's relatively easy to gain height, descending is a bit harder as P can't fall very far without getting crushed into a red paste by gravity. (This will be the cause of most of your deaths.) You can mitigate the effect of some landings by holding crouch to roll out of the fall, keeping your momentum as you do, but any fall that would be a death will still kill you. On the ground, you can crouch to walk slowly under things, yes, but it's more useful to quickly slide under them so you can keep running on the other side.

Combat is also pretty simple. You've got a short combo and a charge move, but one slice is usually enough to kill anything that moves so that's what I stuck with. At first, combat felt a little hectic and like I lacked control, but that's when I started parrying. By pressing the attack button with the right timing, usually when an enemy is sparking, you can parry—hold on, let me check my notes here—LITERALLY ANYTHING. You can even parry traps in the environment, and while I haven't been able to do it yet I'm sure you can somehow parry the mines that instantly kill you if you step in their radius. I may be a certified sucker for what people are now calling parryslop, but I think Motorslice has one of the best parries out there simply because it works on everything.

Using the sword, you can also perform the titular Motorslice. Certain surfaces, marked with yellow or orange coloring, allow you to stab your blade in, then move up or down by revving the motor. Motorslicing is... a bit of a mixed bag. It's always satisfying and looks incredibly cool, but actually controlling it is a different story. While actions like wallrunning/climbing and roll landings have their directions determined by how you're holding the left stick, Motorslicing up or sideways is determined by the direction P is facing. As you can probably guess, this got me killed quite a few times. It just feels clunky and I never got used to waiting for P to turn mid-air before slicing again, especially in high pressure, time sensitive situations. Motorslicing is also how you attack larger foes like bosses, so I would often be making some progress in a boss fight only to fall to my death because I couldn't get P to face the direction I needed.

Motorslice is at its best when you're combining all of your skills and rushing through a location as fast as you possibly can while leaving scrap in your wake and jamming to some killer drum-and-bass music. When the level design finally lets you loose to do so, it's some of the most fun platforming I've experienced in a long time. When it asks you to divine a way forward or get through obstacles you can only react to through memorization and trial and error is where things fall short. The game has a learning curve, sure, but some of the jumps you're asked to negotiate can feel almost mean at times. Even with the quick restart time, it can get pretty frustrating. Some of the bosses in particular left me scratching my head as to how I was supposed to figure out their mechanics without the hints available after you die. Those hints can range from cryptic and unhelpful to straight up telling you what to do, which is far from ideal.

Even with over 200 deaths under my belt by the end of the game, I never got so discouraged I wanted to never pick the game back up. That's largely thanks to just how fun Motorslice is when you finally get into that flow state. It feels slightly rarer than it should, but those moments are genuinely what this genre is all about to me. Maybe that's because I grew up a Sonic kid, but there's just something about going incredibly fast while remaining totally in control and confident that's like crack cocaine to me. Add in some fantastic, low-poly visuals, amazing music, and satisfying, quick combat and you've got something special. Even with my issues, Motorslice is something special.