MOTORSLICE is a fundamentally great but janky parkour game. It features a charming main character but lacks the writing to support her. While the core movement mechanics are fantastic, they also feature some inherent issues, which are exacerbated by the game's level design. Despite these shortcomings, MOTORSLICE is an overall good experience. Story and Setting Players control Slicer P, a woman deployed to a megastructure to rid it of its robot inhabitants. There is little else being overtly told to you, except for sparse hints of the world's backgrounds or some other concepts P is interested in. However, very little of it is ever elaborated on. Rather, MS throws out terminology like ‘The Silent War’, ‘Alpha Structure’, ‘Prism’, as if any of it means anything at all to you. MS is not a story-focused game by any means; however, this is a cardinal sin of writing. It is not that the game just poorly explains these terms or that there is further exposition hidden to be discovered outside of dialogue, but that MS’ world is creatively bankrupt, and its “worldbuilding” is rather used to imply a complexity that simply doesn’t exist to evoke a sense of curiosity in the player, which is inevitably betrayed by the cliffhanger ending. Apart from it, I actually find the dialogue fairly charming. Effectively, the only instances of a story being delivered to you are via brief, optional sequences in which P takes a break to talk to her companion orb; usually these scenes are comedic in nature and just toss out those aforementioned terms every now and again to hint at a greater picture. These sequences also feature dialogue choices for her Orb to reply to, but it isn’t reactive. That is to say, one reply is typically serious, and the other is flirtatious, with neither affecting P’s response in a meaningful way or even feeling outright nonsensical. MOTORSLICE's world is charming but inherently complete gibberish. Gameplay MS is a parkour game, meaning that the core gameplay loop is going to be trying to navigate the brutalist megastructure, ascending to its highest point, and only engaging peripherally with combat whenever robots are in your path. Each chapter represents its own level on the central pillar, which makes for a nice feeling of progression as the entirety of MS’s world is so interconnected. Despite this, MS is also a very linear game, with a clear and intended structure to follow rather than leaning into its parkour mechanics to allow for the player to find ways to scale the structure all on their own. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3722463281 While its core movement mechanics are well-designed, the introduction of further movement gimmicks in the latter half of its eight-chapter campaign shows some glaring issues with its controls, leading to a frequently unnecessarily frustrating experience. For instance, the basic movement options are jumping, wall-running, and the titular motorslicing, in which P rams her chainsaw into a wall and travels alongside it. This feels great when it is first introduced, and the game attempts to expand on it around the halfway point by asking players to switch between vertical and horizontal slicing. This is a perfectly natural evolution and would be fine on its own, but the game struggles to translate this into its control scheme. Players cannot just control P via the analog stick but rather have to stop their motorslicing, reangle her to be facing either to the side (horizontal) or facing up to the wall (vertical), and then reinitiate the motorslicing. This isn’t instantaneous, and given the tightness of some parkour sections, it will lead to players continuously beginning their motorslicing in the wrong direction or whiffing the input entirely. The aforementioned example was about MS’s inherent jank due to character movement, but another, way, way, way worse example is hacking. This is a mechanic introduced very late into the game and essentially just denotes that certain platforms can be pushed or pulled at a distance by pressing Y (assuming gamepad controls). One section in the chapter is a timed parkour segment, where players need to motorslice around a rotating pillar, dodging traps along the way and eventually also pulling out platforms during their motorslicing to continue. Keep in mind, motorslicing is a continuous input (X), which, when let go, will also interrupt your motorslicing to allow for the aforementioned possibility of changing directions. This may sound overly negative, but these two examples are extremes to illustrate some weaknesses that MS currently heavily suffers from and which often can lead to situations that are simply frustrating for no good reason. Apart from the parkour, combat is not very complex and also does not gain any complexity as the game progresses. P can simply swing her chainsaw in a simple one-two, can charge her attack, and can attack mid-air, which can be comboed into another mid-air jump and is used for some parkour segments. There is not a lot of enemy variety, with only three regular robot types throughout all of the game's chapters. Variety herein comes more in the form of varying traps being introduced over time but is still a bit lackluster. Bosses aren’t combat challenges either but represent prolonged parkour puzzles during which P climbs a giant robot to slice at its weakpoints. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3722760917 Boss designs are a bit mixed, and so is the experience of fighting them, as the intended way forward is far less clear than during normal level progression. There are some awkward situations in which a leap of faith seems required or where you scale the boss in an unintended way and unlock a checkpoint that later one forces you into a weird position of needing to find a way to safely backtrack to attack parts you may have skipped. Overall, they are still a highlight even if they never reach the grandiosity of MS's inspiration Shadow of the Colossus. Graphics and Sound Visually, MOTORSLICE is a bit mixed. P is expressive, and the game manages to present the scale of the Megastructure well. However, this also means that there are very little variations in the environment. It’s desert-y streets and dark hallways and very little in between, which isn’t a negative by itself but simply something to be aware of when judging the aesthetic of the game. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3722760438 The soundtrack is perfectly fine by itself but can be a bit repetitive, consisting solely of environmental and combat music. Sound effects are well-designed and also used decently well as combat cues for parrying. Technical Issues and Performance MOTORSLICE is a bit of a mess currently. There are reported issues of people respawning in different chapters upon dying, and the Chapter 8 boss can be entirely shut down by parrying it once. That being said, the game ran fairly well for me without any stuttering or crashes. I’d consider these issues fairly minor and likely to be fixed soon, and that the bigger issue lies with the inherent control issues I have covered in the Gameplay segment. Final Thoughts A pretty good game that fills a long-forgotten niche. It is a game that can be easily recommended and, with its relatively short runtime, also is not very likely to overstay its welcome. It has a charming main character, and it knows its audience well, with enough confidence to also translate that knowledge into a solid gameplay experience. Personally, I enjoyed the initial half of the game far more than the latter and would have just hoped that the game had tuned up the complexity of its parkour based on its basic movement mechanics rather than trying to increase the complexity of the movement itself, which is likewise a criticism that can be expanded to the level design growing more annoying as a result.