AVERAGE TO THE MAX
Also for: Windows
Let's begin with some uplifting news: I played Zack Zero, the obscure
platformer from Crocodile Entertainment, by streaming it through PS
Plus, and it worked splendidly. After harboring some doubts regarding the quality of the service, I now feel free to check out the rest of the PS3 streaming
catalogue. Y'know, before it disappears.
This game, however, is completely unremarkable. The less said, the better.
It's a super-duper-average platformer with a few good ideas and many flaws in
execution. You control Zack Zero on a quest to rescue his fiancee from some
alien scumbag. The game consists of eight sidescrolling levels depicted in
confusing 2,5D. This means you can sometimes reach platforms slightly in
the background, but very rarely so. The result is an awkward 3D depiction of
a hybrid 2D/3D playing field.
Visually, the game represents a maximalistic design philosophy. Technically, it looks PS3-decent, but
the screen is too cluttered with graphical detail in every color of the spectrum. With the ever-shifting camera angles and 2,5D design, it's hard
to tell exactly what to regard as important or merely decorative. Platforms, animals, collectibles, machinery - it all co-exists in an extravaganza of confusion. You sometimes expect to land on a platform, only to end up falling to your death because it was slightly in the background. To make matters worse, sometimes objects in the foreground hide the
action.
But maybe younger audiences will have an easier time. Maybe their brains are wired to interpret such visual language. The children's cartoon
artstyle and juvenile storytelling makes it clear that I'm not the target
audience, anyway.
Zack's blue suit has the power to switch between different elements - fire,
earth and ice - with different advantages and puzzle-solving properties.
Fire-Zack hastens you and lets you extend your jumps by levitating.
Earth-Zack can smash through brittle surfaces and push heavy objects.
Ice-Zack can slow down time. Each have their unique, devastating attacks.
Using these elements will quickly drain the suit's power, but it'll recharge
when you're back in your default "Zack" mode.
I only wish he could transform into a ball as well: Ball-Zack.
I like the somewhat open level design, with hidden chambers with
collectibles and optional routes through some stages. Challenge variation is
decent, and the controls are unremarkable enough to not cause too much misery. The enemy variation is lacklustre, and what little we get is
mostly re-skins of earlier fiends. I like the platforming challenges -
crumbling floors, traps, levitating platforms, etc - and the puzzles are easy
but challenging enough to suck up to my low-maintenance gamer pride.
Grabbing collectibles and killing enemies add to your experience points, and
ever so often Zack will level up. This is a pointless feature, increasing
damage resistence, strength and longevity to some of his powers. It happens
automatically, and the differences are unnoticeable - it's a poor man's way
to incentivize exploration.
Now to the worst aspect of the game: The bossfights. They're all (but one)
too easy because of boss checkpoints. With every third of his total health
meter gone, a cutscene will trigger and upon death you get to restart from
there. So you might as well just run in close, soak up some hits and punch
him until you reach a checkpoint. If you die, you can retry from there. Then repeat until you reach the next
checkpoint, and so on...
Also, why doesn't the game require use of your different elements during any
bossfight? All you need is your standard form. The different attacks aren't
really required throughout the game.
Also, the boss attack patterns are super-predictable - easy to learn, easy
to master. Bossmen: You no fun because too easily die.
Well, except for the final one. Overall, the hit detection is abysmal
throughout the game, and the end boss suffers for that. You can only harm
him during a brief window after one specific attack, that he uses totally at
random. You can wait forever for it to appear. Then, that attack has an
illogical, insipid hit detection, and when hit, you get stunned and only
have time to get one or two hits in on him! Luckily, he also has checkpoints.
But after finally defeating him the first time this happened: The game
glitched out on me. After the winning cutscene, my character clipped into the
character model of the boss' corpse and got stuck. I could only back out to
the main menu and reload. I went berserk when I realized I had to redo the
bossfight from scratch. So I beat him twice, just to reach the ending, which
was a horrible final "cutscene" (consisting of stills and poor voice
narration). And I got a trophy - but wouldn't you say the game owed me two?
Glitches were plenty overall, but insignificant enough to not ruin my
progress. In fact, I jumped through the rock wall above a locked gate to
clear a section, without having to find the lever to open it. When glitches
help progress, I can accept them.
Crocodile Entertainment was a short-lived developer, and their
self-published Zack Zero was their only release. It's clear they were hoping
for more, because the story ends with a cliffhanger that sets up a brand new
adventure in Zack Zero 2. But alas, I guess the first game didn't sell well enough to fund that project and to my knowledge, the studio doesn't exist anymore. That's always a sad conclusion.
Their mistake was releasing a game that felt sloppy. It had some nice ideas
with the elemental switching and the open level design. Too bad they didn't funnel that idea into a creative vision and instead went for genre tropes. Zack Zero is decent, but not
worth playing past the first couple of levels. It doesn't get any different
past that, nor any better.
[All screenshots taken from
www.mobygames.com]
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