Zack Zero review (PSN)

Made2Game Zack Zero review score: 8/10
Formats: PS3 (Playstation Network)
Format Reviewed: PS3
Developer: Crocodile Entertainment
Publisher: Crocodile Entertainment

It’s a hard life being a galactic superhero. No sooner have you and your stunning fiancé inadvertently thwarted the invasion plans of a bloodthirsty intergalactic Emperor, than said Emperor is kidnapping the missus in order to lead you to his evil lair as part of a diabolical revenge scheme. It’s certainly not the best way to begin an engagement, but that’s the immediate problem facing the valiant-but-slow-witted hero of Crocodile Entertainment’s PSN-exclusive side-scroller, Zack Zero.

Zero Hour
Luckily, Zack is a well-equipped space adventurer in possession of a very cool experimental suit that can harness the powers of three elements, namely earth, ice and fire. Learning to switch between all three is essential, as all the puzzles and set-pieces in each level revolve around using the correct element for the situation.

 There's surprising detail and depth in each level, particularly in the opening area
 

Although not immediately apparent, the world shares several elements with Chair’s Shadow Complex, particularly the 2.5D levels that allow you to hop between the foreground and background whilst navigating jumps and traps, and in the ability to shoot to Zack’s left and right whilst only moving him forward and back. The well-detailed levels – ranging from sandy wastelands populated by giant wildlife to dark, futuristic spacecraft interiors and massive industrial production lines complete with conveyor belts and man-sized circular saws – are large and colourful, often hiding secret areas and collectibles for the intrepid explorer.

Also like Shadow Complex, you begin the game with Zack’s suit powered up to the max and are given a chance to use all the powers that will become available later, such as slowing time with the ice suit or “surfing” across wider gaps with the fire suit. As is always the case, you lose these powers after the opening level and must then collect energy drops from enemies to regain your former glory. Unfortunately, evolution follows a set path and you’re not given any choice concerning which power unlocks when – it doesn’t really affect anything negatively, but an element of control would have been welcome.

Zero Point
The story is told in a series of animated comic strips, voiced over by a narrator who sounds like a sports announcer. The plot is pretty throwaway, but serves to wrap up the action nicely and present Zack with a quest worthy of his powers – if not his brain. Hardly the sharpest tool in the box, his expression constantly swings between smug and perplexed and his noble-yet-naïve personality provides a good percentage of the title’s pervasive humour. In fact, it’s Crocodile Entertainment’s charming sense of comedy adventure that sees Zack Zero through some of its more unforgiving difficulty spikes.

Some of the bosses are crazy big, and can easily make an ash-pile out of plucky hero Zack. Luckily, he's not without tricks of his own...

Presented as a series of fairly long levels spread across the aforementioned variety of colourful locales, Zack Zero evokes elements of old-school platformers like Mega Man X. And by that we mean it’s occasionally bastard-hard. Although 75% of the time deaths are down to a lack of speed and coordination on the player’s part, the other 25% are caused by an unbalanced combat system and occasionally unresponsive controls – or perhaps not unresponsive, but rather not responsive enough for the split-second timing that’s often required.

Fighting the bog-standard goons isn’t exactly taxing, to be fair, and each of the suit’s powers has offensive capabilities that can affect groups of attackers at once – the problem is that for an intergalactic superhero, Zack isn’t very resilient to damage. It only takes a few compounded hits to kill him, and as the camera likes to zoom right out during a lot of the fights it’s often hard to really see what’s going on through all the screen-filling special effects and admittedly-gorgeous colours. It’s not helped by the fact that health refills and XP come in the form of little red or black bugs that you have to chase down once they’re expelled from a defeated enemy – we lost count of the amount of times we perished while chasing down a runaway health-refill mid-fight. The occasional boss fights require a shift in tactics and sometimes force you to think your way around the confrontation – not easy when you’re busy trying to net elusive health points.

Zero Tolerance
Simply navigating levels suffers occasional moments of monstrous difficulty, too, as one moment you’re hopping over jumps and ducking under laser-beams with glorious abandon and the next you’re flattened by a house-sized industrial press that seemed to come out of nowhere. It’s impossible to foresee everything that Zack Zero throws at you, and so occasionally resorting to trial and error die-and-retry gameplay is the only way through. The suit powers are brilliant, though, and how the various abilities integrate into both combat and navigation is a real credit to Crocodile Entertainment.

This factory area is a pain in the neck, requiring some serious concentration and precise timing to navigate it unscathed

One of the biggest gripes we found was with the annoying fall animations. As a 2D platformer often requiring twitch-finger timing and the switching of modes on the fly, you will mis-time jumps and fall off ledges regularly, at which point you’ll be treated to a five-second clip of Zack falling to his doom towards a backdrop that only changes depending on whether you’re inside or outside. If you fall off twenty different ledges in one level, regardless of the suit mode you were in when you fell, the animation will be the same. It’s not at the same level as, say, Too Human’s Valkyrie, but the same animation and the same screaming sound effect ten times in quick succession on several occasions per level soon becomes very tiring. It’s not a major issue, but it compounds the often frustrating difficulty when you’re punished by repetitive cutscenes every time you screw up.

Performance is scored at the end of each stage, with points awarded for how fast you cleared the level, how many floating green crystals you managed to collect and how many hidden relics you got your mitts on. Some of these relics are very tricky to find, whilst others are almost right in front of you – as soon as you spot one every other priority goes out the window as you immediately begin to plot your route to it. In this genre, encouraging exploration and experimentation is important, and Crocodile Entertainment have nailed the “one-more-go” quality that a game like Zack Zero really benefits from. Online leaderboards only exacerbate this element, ensuring that no matter how high your score, you’ll never feel it’s high enough.

Zero Waste
Graphically, Zack Zero is mostly gorgeous. The visuals are bright and enticing, the colour palette varied and well-chosen, evoking a definite air of Disney/Pixar likeability – particularly when combined with the tongue-in-cheek sense of fun. Thankfully, the slightly hyper-active camera doesn’t detract too much from what is, overall, a well-crafted, well-polished experience.

The colour scheme is brilliantly vibrant throughout, adding to the charm and likeability of Zack Zero's world

The only performance issue we found throughout was an occasional problem with the game freezing, which, to their credit, Crocodile Entertainment are upfront about on their website. They are working on a fix, and we have to admit that it only affected us twice throughout the whole game. It can be avoided by logging out of PSN – but unfortunately you won’t be able to improve your leaderboard ranking if you do.

In Zack Zero, Crocodile Entertainment have delivered an attractive, solid action platformer with a great side order of humour. The only real negative is the imbalanced difficulty throughout, alongside a few annoying niggles that can easily be removed if the developers ever make a sequel. It’s a good length for an arcade title, and the urge to replay levels and chase that perfect score will keep completionists busy for a while. For everyone else it’s a welcome distraction from po-faced shooters and stat-heavy RPGs, and one that is all too aware of its classic gaming roots and revels in them. It might be occasionally very hard and sometimes a little frustrating, but its always fun – and we’ve Zero problem with recommending it to anyone with a tenner to spare.

Words by Mick Fraser (Twitter: @Jedi_Beats_Tank)

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