Zack Zero (PS3)
Sometimes I wonder if The Game Hoard should have been an impartial showcase of a game’s features without any critique of their effectiveness or design, but then I play games like Zack Zero. On paper, a lot of what Zack Zero does sounds like it could lead to a great game, but almost everything it attempts it manages to mess up in some way.
Zack Zero’s story seems to be imitating the old adventure serials like Buck Rogers, the player meant to feel like they’re coming into a world that existed before this game and one where many more adventures will happen after it. The problem with this approach is how much backtracking and flashbacks the story has to do to make its narrative work. Between levels where the story isn’t really progressing the game will arbitrarily throw in a description of past events to try and help you make sense of its plot. Zack and his girlfriend Marlene were two incredibly capable heroes who worked together stopping evil across space, but when they kill the alien Zulrog’s brother to stop his evil scheme, Zulrog aims for revenge by capturing Marlene and demanding a special substance called Kelestinia that will allow the alien to rewrite history. You spend the game fighting your way towards Zulrog’s lair, taking some small deviations here and there but mostly just trying to get to the final fight with the alien overlord. The odd part about your adventure is that, despite fighting many of Zulrog’s troops who are definitely angling to kill Zack, he seems perfectly willing to hand over the Kelestinia to get Marlene back, there not even being an attempt to justify why an entire game happened between the kidnapping and the confrontation with Zulrog.
The story is poorly structured and ambles off down diversions that don’t really add much to the game besides extra levels, but if you try and view things from a pure gameplay perspective, things still feel like they’re composed shoddily. This action platformer’s main gimmick is Zack’s ability to shift between four different forms, the game starting you off with every possible upgrade unlocked to give you a taste of his full potential before it knocks you down to level 1 and you have you have to level up to earn some of them again. It’s likely the developer had heard the favorable reaction to games like Metroid Prime where you spend the early parts of the game recovering the cool abilities you lost after the first boss, but Zack Zero’s attempts to mimic this are done clumsily. Each of Zack’s forms has important functions for engaging with the level design, and rather than stripping them away and reintroducing them in dedicated areas later down the line, you instead get to keep every important ability and earn unnecessary but helpful attacking abilities over the course of the game.
What this ultimately means is that most of Zack Zero is basically spent with all the abilities you need to succeed, and since the game has all of the important skills available at once, it doesn’t really spend too much time exploring any of them. Instead, you’ll find an area in a level with an object or hazard that can only be handled by your special forms, the player briefly shifting into them to overcome them and then reverting back to your less specialized base form until the next challenge. If you find some fragile rock or a lever, you become the beefy Earth form to make it possible to move forward. If there are hazards like crushing pillars that move too quickly to get past, switch to Ice form to slow down time for a bit. Fire form is perhaps the only one that can help with the platforming outside of its specialized areas where the power’s use is basically mandatory. Fire speeds up Zack’s movements and gives him a mid-air hover to complement his double jump, and since it is the one that is potentially useful outside of dedicated moments, it also chews through your form meter so quickly that it can’t be integrated into regular play too often.
Zack’s regular form is meant to handle most of the unimaginative platforming and combat, but it is thankfully not too weak comparatively. If anything, it is probably the preferred form for most every fight. Earth form is slow and can’t jump, meaning you’ll take a lot of damage if you use it on anything but a slow or stunned opponent. Fire and Ice form both have moves that can deal with crowds but they exhaust themselves quickly or have little bugbears like the ice form needing to freeze enemies and then damage them again after to actually dispense with them. Base form has an attack that is both short range and long range as it needs to be and you have the jumping ability necessary to dodge the bigger enemies or just get yourself out of the swarms of baddies the game throws at you in dedicated combat sections. The important thing to note though is while Zack’s base form is capable and ice and fire can speed up fights, your opposition is fairly repetitive and rarely asks for any degree of strategy. Even if you find out a good sequence of power mixing to deal with foes, its not really much of a step up from just hammering your basic attack options to clear out the rabble. Enemy numbers are often the substitute for challenging enemy designs, with the tougher enemies mostly just being waiting out a pattern before you strike. Some fights can even end up triggering glitches, such as a case where a miniboss wasn’t dead before I triggered the checkpoint on the other side of the locked gate he was defending. The area after had many instant death drops tied to the poorly implemented wind vents you are meant to ride despite the strength of their lift being sometimes unreliable, so setting me back to the checkpoint put me by the gate, unable to continue until the miniboss on the other side of it was defeated again. Luckily Zack has abilities that can damage things through walls so I could continue, but there are other issues that are outright built into the design such as the game’s embrace of 2.5D play.
2.5D as a concept usually means the player character moves on a 2D sidescrolling plane that either moves through a 3D space or offers moments where you can move into or out of the background. Yoshi’s Crafted World, Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards are examples of such games where the boundaries of the 2D world are broken somewhat to add fun little gimmicks to navigation, but pretty much any time its introduced into Zack Zero, it makes things worse. Some parts of the game ask you to jump between layers of an area to overly complicate a platforming segment that would have been straightforward otherwise, such as scaling the rocks of a mountain that arbitrarily asks for you to move between layers. The action isn’t totally reliable, feeling a bit like LittleBigPlanet’s layer hopping because the action feels like it needs a moment to determine if the action is viable instead of just executing it fluidly. Enemies can also inhabit the 3D space even when you aren’t able to move into it, and while your ice blast can hit them while they’re exploiting their dimensional advantage, it’s hardly a solution to enemies with guns standing off to the side peppering you while you’ve still got a gaggle of baddies crowded around your character to deal with. The combat is already dull without this complication and the platforming is generic at its best, so this half-hearted implementation of what likely sounded like a nifty feature only piles on the problems with Zack Zero’s execution.
Some deviations from the main path contain interesting sections or hidden collectibles that require a bit more skill to acquire, but other aspects like the high score leaderboard for each level feel like afterthoughts because the game’s stages are somewhat long despite being fairly few in number. You aren’t really given the room to creatively chase high scores and the gameplay isn’t really designed to feed into a point system anyway in another layer to the game where ambition outstripped polish. Every now and then you will come across an area that asks for some power use or problem solving that briefly shows a glimmer of what Zack Zero could have been right before it throws you back into the sloppy and repetitive level design that let this game down so much.
THE VERDICT: Zack Zero tries to do a lot of things and fails at almost all of them in some manner. The power system is mostly just used to overcome generic level obstacles, the combat is sloppy and dull, the 2.5D platforming adds unnecessary and poorly implemented complications to already generic play, and the story tries to be like a serial adventure story but then falls all over itself as it realizes it has no idea how to establish such a narrative. You can see potential in every aspect of Zack Zero in the moments where the mechanics almost match what they should be used for, but Zack Zero is a constantly stumbling adventure where the good times don’t last long, the generic moments fill up much of the experience, and the awful glitches and design problems rear their head frequently enough to undo whatever decent work the rest of the game almost achieved.
And so, I give Zack Zero for PlayStation 3…
A TERRIBLE rating. Latching onto the bland moments of play or the few collectibles with decent little challenges tied to them is hardly what you want to emphasize in describing a game’s appeals. Zack Zero is a jumbled mess of ideas where very few of them feel like they’re actually meant for the same game. The 2.5D elements don’t gel with the transformations, the transformations don’t augment the regular platforming or combat in interesting ways, and the story makes the entire adventure seem frivolous because it doesn’t make sense within the context of the plot. Not only does every part of the game need to be improved to work on their own merits, but the relationship between them is so flawed that it’s hard to see even the well executed versions of its ideas forming into something cohesive. A focus on better exploring the transformations is probably the best route, with some aspects like the 2.5D play best off completely stripped out of the experience to allow those mechanics to shine. Combat could have been focused more on roadblock enemies who require smart or skillful ability use, such as what is attempted with the worm monsters who pop out of the wall to eat you that seem like they require the slow down ability to get past until you realize they’re just as easily avoided without it.
Zack Zero is like taking the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” to an even greater degree of unfocused failure. This could have potentially come together as something interesting in the right hands, or it could have kept its vision narrow and succeeded in small ways, but instead, Zack Zero shows why it’s important I not just present a list of facts about a game. While I’m not really trying to inform purchasing decisions with how I showcase games, the quality of an experience is important to understanding a video game, and Zack Zero goes to show how much a game can be defined by its failures.