AVERAGE TO THE MAX
Let’s begin with some unexpectedly uplifting news: I played Zack Zero, the obscure platformer from Crocodile Entertainment, via PS Plus streaming—and it worked flawlessly. After harboring doubts about the service, I now feel confident enough to explore the rest of the PS3 streaming catalogue. You know, before it quietly vanishes.
The game itself, however, is entirely unremarkable. The less said, the better. Zack Zero is a thoroughly average platformer with a handful of decent ideas and a great many problems in execution. You control Zack on a quest to rescue his fiancée from some alien scumbag. The adventure spans eight sidescrolling levels presented in a confusing 2.5D perspective, where you can occasionally access platforms in the background—but rarely enough to matter. The result is an awkward hybrid that never quite commits to either 2D or 3D.
Visually, the game embraces maximalism. Technically, it looks passable by PS3 standards, but the screen is constantly cluttered with detail in every color imaginable. Combined with shifting camera angles and the 2.5D layout, it’s often unclear what’s interactive and what’s merely decorative. Platforms, enemies, collectibles, machinery—it all blends into a chaotic visual soup. You’ll regularly attempt to land on what looks like solid ground, only to plummet to your death because the platform sat half a meter too far back. Foreground objects frequently obscure the action, compounding the frustration.
Perhaps younger players have an easier time parsing this visual language. Maybe their brains are better wired for it. The cartoonish art style and juvenile storytelling make it clear that I’m not the intended audience anyway.
Zack’s blue suit allows him to switch between elemental forms—fire, earth, and ice—each with distinct abilities and puzzle-solving applications. Fire Zack moves faster and can extend jumps by briefly levitating. Earth Zack smashes brittle surfaces and pushes heavy objects. Ice Zack slows time. Each form also has its own combat attack. Using these powers drains the suit’s energy, which recharges when you return to Zack’s default state. It’s a solid system, even if I secretly wished for one more form: Ball Zack.
The level design is somewhat open, with hidden chambers, collectibles, and optional routes through certain stages. Challenge variety is serviceable, and the controls are bland enough to avoid causing serious irritation. Enemy variety, however, is poor—most foes are simple reskins of earlier ones. The platforming challenges themselves are decent: crumbling floors, traps, moving platforms, and light puzzles that are simple but engaging enough to satisfy my modest gamer pride.
Collectibles and enemy kills grant experience points, occasionally leveling Zack up. This system is entirely pointless. Levels automatically boost damage resistance, strength, and power duration, but the differences are barely noticeable. It’s a lazy attempt to incentivize exploration, and it adds nothing meaningful to the experience.
The game’s worst aspect is its boss fights. All but one are trivialized by overly generous checkpoints. Every time a boss loses a third of its health, a cutscene triggers—and upon death, you restart from that point. This encourages brute-force tactics: rush in, absorb hits, mash attacks until the next checkpoint, repeat. There’s no tension, no strategy, and no punishment for sloppy play.
Even worse, the elemental system is almost completely ignored during boss encounters. You can defeat every boss using Zack’s default form. The elemental abilities, while conceptually interesting, are largely unnecessary throughout the game. Boss patterns are predictable, easy to learn, and even easier to exploit.
Except for the final boss. Here, the game’s abysmal hit detection becomes a serious problem. You can only damage him during a brief window after one specific attack, which he uses at random. You may wait minutes for the opportunity, only for the hit detection to betray you. When struck, Zack is stunned long enough to land one or two hits at best. Thankfully, this fight also has checkpoints—small mercies.
After finally defeating the boss the first time, the game glitched. Following the victory cutscene, Zack clipped into the boss’s corpse and became permanently stuck. I had no choice but to return to the main menu and reload. Realizing I had to redo the entire boss fight sent me into a mild rage. I beat him again, reached the ending—a dreadful “cutscene” composed of static images and limp narration—and earned a trophy. Frankly, I feel entitled to two.
Glitches are common throughout the game, though rarely progress-blocking. In fact, one glitch allowed me to jump through a rock wall and bypass a locked gate entirely. When bugs help me move forward, I’m willing to forgive them.
Crocodile Entertainment was a short-lived developer, and Zack Zero was their only release. It’s clear they hoped for a sequel—the game ends on a cliffhanger clearly setting up Zack Zero 2. That sequel never materialized, and as far as I know, neither does the studio anymore. That’s always a sad ending.
Their mistake was releasing a sloppy platformer in a genre that was already past its prime. The elemental switching and open level design had potential, but instead of building a strong creative vision around those ideas, the game leans heavily on tired genre tropes. Zack Zero is competent but uninspired, and not worth playing beyond the first few levels. It doesn’t meaningfully evolve, nor does it improve.
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