It sometimes leans a bit too much into its influences, bringing with it its own set of platforming frustrations and technical issues, but when it all comes together, Motorslice offers an incredibly engaging experience that invokes some of the best games of all time but adds its own twists that make it memorable on its own.

Motorslice puts you in the shoes of P, a chainsaw-wielding Slicer sent with a simple mission to destroy every machine she encounters, alongside her friendly drone Orbie. It quickly becomes clear that the world has been taken over by evil construction equipment that range anywhere from tractors and loaders to massive bulldozers and motor graders, and the only way to save this world is to climb to the top of the megastructure controlling these machines and destroying everything in the way.

It’s a compelling if somewhat familiar setup that paves the way for platforming challenges and machine obliteration, and the construction environment gives the entire game the kind of lighthearted enjoyability that comes with battling 80-foot-tall excavators.

"The game does a fantastic job at teaching you its rules through a gradual build in each level and forces you to come to grips with each of its individual systems."

Where Motorslice defines itself is in its clear influence from a handful of beloved action-adventure games, most notably Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Shadow of the Colossus. Most of the game is centered around platforming challenges, separated into five checkpoints each for all of its 8 main chapters.

These task you with wall-running, precision jumping, and climbing your way over and up various obstacles as you make your way to the top of the megastructure, and they increase in difficulty as you near the apex of the tower. The magnetic platforming and linear level design here highlight the admiration for The Sands of Time, and the platforming has built on that foundation to make what is a largely recognizable but nevertheless satisfying experience.

The game does a fantastic job at teaching you its rules through a gradual build in each level and forces you to come to grips with each of its individual systems. What starts as wall-running down straight corridors evolves into scaling massive moving machines and often keeping your feet off the ground for extended periods at a time. You can also challenge yourself with more obscure challenges to obtain Orb Drones, and while these don’t offer much aside from a collectible, the platforming challenges they offer are another way that it allows you to hone and show off your skills.

The platforming feels great most of the time, but in some ways it also takes some of the quirks and frustrations of its influences as well. It can often be immediately unclear which direction you’re meant to go, and because this is a game where platforming and movement are king, it can be a drag to spend time away from that while trying to eyeball the path forward. The platforming, too, can be finnicky, especially in the late game where precision is amplified and mistakes are punished.

You never quite know which direction P is going to jump when coming off a wall or whether she will jump straight up a wall or begin wall-running, nor is it always clear which platforms are reachable from a certain spot. Some of this encourages trial and error throughout each level, but as the levels get longer and retries become more arduous, the frustration that comes from seeming inconsistencies in the platforming logic grows. Add on top of this controls that can sometimes feel non-responsive, such as when you’re repeatedly wall-jumping, and there are certain moments where the platforming can feel more disheartening than satisfying.

Alongside the traditional platforming, Motorslice introduces its new titular mechanic as another way to quickly get around and frequently get past certain obstacles. Through this mechanic, P uses her chainsaw to cut up or across heavily delineated pieces of certain walls and traverse larger obstacles. This also provides for an additional wrinkle to platforming challenges, as P will often need to combine traditional platforming with motorslices to get past particularly long sequences. As a novel mechanic, this works for most of its usage but creates some of its own frustrations. In particular, the way that you initiate motorslicing is by holding attack while facing toward or to the side of a wall that can be sliced.

"Where motorslicing becomes most important, though, is in combat, especially in boss fights."

If you face toward the wall, you slice up, and if you face to the side, you slice sideways in that direction. This is intuitive enough and gets more natural as the game progresses, but the game does not allow you to switch directions easily despite having numerous challenges built around going both up and to the side without touching the ground, meaning that you have to let go and switch the direction P is facing in mid-air. When it works, it’s incredibly satisfying, but too frequently I found myself slicing in the wrong direction or falling off the wall entirely while doing these challenges.

Where motorslicing becomes most important, though, is in combat, especially in boss fights. Outside of bosses, combat primarily consists of fighting packs of grunt-like loaders and drones, most of which can be killed in one or two hits.

There’s a parry system and a charged attack on top of your normal attack, though aside from drones that can only be killed by parrying their projectiles back to them, I rarely found myself having to use any of my special abilities and never really struggled to progress through these combat sections.

"The health bar represents the sections of the boss you need to slice through, and only once you’ve hit each section does the boss go down."

The bosses, however, are an entirely different beast. Each chapter greets you with a shot of a massive machine in the distance, and all of your traversal is in service of reaching this machine and ultimately destroying it. With these bosses, Motorslice takes a clear cue from Shadow of the Colossus, as each boss is less of a combat challenge and more of a puzzle in which you have to motorslice your way up and around the boss until it’s destroyed.

The health bar represents the sections of the boss you need to slice through, and only once you’ve hit each section does the boss go down. Bosses are an impressive feat of scale, and ascending them is often just as much about solving how to get the boss to the ground as it is about execution. I found these bosses to be the most interesting and memorable aspects of Motorslice, if only because of the impressive scale. They’re not particularly difficult, though I did find myself using the in-game hints in the final few chapters, but these are more about the frequently astonishing visual feast that you can experience while the camera zooms out and you take down colossus-style heavy machinery.

Intertwined between each chapter is a lightly-told but intriguing narrative that centers around P and Orbie learning more about the structure they’re scaling and the nature of the machines they’re destroying. It’s largely told through intermittent periods of slacking off where the two of them discuss their purpose and how they relate to the machines, and it’s almost entirely skippable if you only want to experience the gameplay.

"Visually, Motorslice excels with a distinct art style and color palette despite often being drenched in the classic construction browns and yellows."

While the story isn’t outstanding for this type of setting, it adequately sets the tone for the rest of the gameplay and offers some questions about why we’re fighting these machines and what they actually want, and P’s writing and voice acting provide enough charm that I found myself wanting to hear her inner monologue.

Visually, Motorslice excels with a distinct art style and color palette despite often being drenched in the classic construction browns and yellows. The core visual feature, though, is its sense of scale through both bosses and large scalable or sliceable walls. It’s frequently awe-inspiring when it zooms out and shows you everything you’re conquering, and the stellar lo-fi score often kicks in at the perfect moments to round out the entire experience.

It’s a shame, then, that there are a number of technical problems at launch. I had around half a dozen crashes as well as a number of moments where I was sent through the floor or into an altogether unknown location, and a signature experience of my playthrough was the game soft-locking by sending me into an unknown level without a path forward and requiring me to reinstall the game and delete all save data. The developers have promised a day one patch and additional support after launch, and because of how smooth the experience is when it runs well, I hope these bugs are quickly resolved.

"The titular mechanic enables a new wrinkle to classic platforming challenges, and the game excels in its sense of scale, particularly when solving and taking down its impressively large bosses. "

While much of the experience will feel familiar for fans of old-school 3D platforming adventures like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the bosses take clear cues from Shadow of the Colossus, Motorslice manages to put them together in a package that feels familiar but fresh.

The titular mechanic enables a new wrinkle to classic platforming challenges, and the game excels in its sense of scale, particularly when solving and taking down its impressively large bosses. It’s not perfect, as its controls and inconsistencies can cause some extended periods of frustration, but it succeeds for a game that is evidently attempting to recapture and bring forward the magic of some of the most important games of all time.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.

According to the publisher, “Renata’s parents are world-renown explorers, archeologists and inventors that travel all over the world uncovering the secrets of the past, bringing her with them in their expeditions. However, in their latest adventure, they decide to leave her at the base camp—the Beelzebub ruins are said to be too dangerous!” When he parents don’t return, she grabs their latest invention, the Frogun, and goes after them.

The game promises a colorful, old-school aesthetic, plenty of enemies and traps to use the Frogun on, shortcuts and secrets to find, and plenty of lore items to find. The game looks fun, and it kind of gives me a Captain Toad vibe, though it’s not a perfect 1 to 1. We’ll have to see when Frogun releases next year.

You can watch a trailer for the game below:

"The visuals of the game are heavily inspired by the cuteness and charm found throughout the Paper Mario series, with its use of 2D characters in 3D environments."

Hyper Team Recon has a very beautiful aesthetic, and I’m sure you’ve heard this a lot, but it seems very reminiscent of the Paper Mario games. Did that at all serve as an inspiration when you were coming up for the look of this game?

Yes, the visuals of the game are heavily inspired by the cuteness and charm found throughout the Paper Mario series, with its use of 2D characters in 3D environments.

This might sound like an oddly specific question, but it’s one I’ve gotta ask. Judging depth can often be a bit of a challenge in games that go for the paper-esque art style that Hyper Team Recon is going for. How does the game reconcile that with its nature as a 3D platformer, which requires precise movement? Or is that something that hasn’t even come up as an issue?

So far, only certain earlier areas of the game have been made, where platforming and combat doesn’t demand too much precision, so if there are depth perception problems, they are yet to be found.

Saying that though, if in the future depth perception does in fact become an apparent issue, I believe adding something like a round little drop shadow directly under the player so that they can see exactly where they will land would likely be an effective fix.

Can you tell us about the aliens’ shapeshifting abilities and how these will manifest in the game as gameplay mechanics? 

The three main characters of the game are from an alien species called ‘ayalls’. Ayalls are capable of morphing into other lifeforms, copying their appearance and abilities. The main mechanic of Hyper Team Recon consists of experimenting with this morphing ability in order to access new forms and abilities to explore, uncover secrets and progress. For example, the player could morph into a penguin in order to swim across deep water and discover a secret area.

The idea of being able to transform into anyone you meet is an interesting one, and one that potentially opens up a lot of gameplay opportunities. How does Hyper Team Recon balance this ambitious nature with ensuring that it doesn’t ever feel overwhelming?

To prevent things from becoming overwhelming, new characters and enemies are introduced gradually, with every new enemy encounter having a unique introductory animation of the enemy using their ability. The total amount of unique characters and enemies introduced in each level will stay relatively low in the early levels, introducing more abilities and concepts as the player progresses, encouraging experimentation with all the different forms the player has available to them in order to reach new areas, solve puzzles or deal with tricky enemies!

"Each form grants the player access to one unique ability. Some abilities are made for platforming, such as additional jumps or gliding, while other abilities are made for combat, like a shockwave attack."

Does the shapeshifting mechanic play an equally important role in both combat and platforming?

Yes, there are both forms for platforming and forms for combat. For the most part, friendly NPC’s grant forms with platforming-based abilities, and enemies will have combat-based abilities, allowing you to use enemies’ own attacks against them.

Each form grants the player access to one unique ability. Some abilities are made for platforming, such as additional jumps or gliding, while other abilities are made for combat, like a shockwave attack.

The player isn’t completely helpless without a copied form, however, and copying a form won’t always be mandatory to progress. Without a copied form, the player can still jump around and attack enemies and destructible objects.

How many unique options will the game feature in terms of the forms players can take? How much will the unique abilities of these forms differ from each other?

I aim to have every form in a level feel unique from one another, in both the character designs and the abilities themselves. I feel players will find every level unique regarding the challenges they present, as the levels will be designed with the available abilities and forms in that level in mind, in order to maximize the potential of every ability.

How much of an emphasis does Hyper Team Recon place on its story, world, and characters?

There will be a good amount of dialogue, character and word building throughout the game with its combination of both cutscenes and in-game conversations with characters. The main gist of the story is that three alien recon troops are assigned the job of going to Earth to gather information on the planet and the life forms found on it in order to see whether the planet is suitable for their alien species to live on, as their species are looking for a new planet to live on.

Throughout the game, players will meet and interact with a wide variety of characters as they explore Earth, each with their own personality, dialogue, and ability.

I hope that players enjoy the dialogue and all the interactions to be found by talking to all the different characters found throughout the game!

"I feel players will find every level unique regarding the challenges they present."

Hyper Team Recon promises various collectibles in its world, which is great for extending a game’s replay value, and feels right at home in any platformer. Can you tell us more about these collectibles, and what finding them will entail, in terms of combat, puzzles, or platforming challenges?

Firstly, there is foil, the main collectable in the game. Foil can be found all throughout each level, as well as found within destructible objects. Foil is used to fill out pages in the scrapbook, a book that unlocks extra content as you use fill it up, including cutscenes, short bonus challenge levels, and costumes for the characters.

Other collectables include the three medals obtainable in each level. Each medal represents an optional objective, and by clearing that objective within the level, you gain that medal.

The first medal, the red medal, is earned by collecting a set amount of foil within the level. Players’ will have to be careful not to die too much, as dying makes you drop some foil. The second medal, the blue medal, is earned by finding five hidden souvenir collectibles in the level. The third medal, the yellow medal, is earned by simply not dying in the level.

If all three medals in a level are collected, the player will unlock a special costume for the character used in the level, that they can equip in the menu!

Roughly how long will an average playthrough of Hyper Team Recon be?

A playthrough, I estimate. would take around 8-9 hours. This is keeping in mind that to get 100% people will need to do a lot of exploration and may have to replay levels to complete some of the optional medal objectives they may have missed, as well and fill out the scrapbook in its entirety, clearing every extra challenge level found within.

Since the reveal of the PS5 and Xbox Series X’s specs, a lot of comparisons have been made between the speeds of the two consoles’ GPUs, with the PS5 at 10.28 TFLOPS and the Xbox Series X at 12 TFLOPS- but how much of an impact on development do you think that difference will have?

To be honest – it’s doubtful either of these technical specifications will make a big distinction or difference on development. While it’s easy to see how this may affect some other games, especially on the AAA side, for games which aren’t solely about pushing graphical fidelity to their limit, it’s hard to really see this improving anything. Performance on many games was already quite good on prior generational systems, so the only real benefit is perhaps better rendering capabilities or better stability to frame rate.

The PS5 features an incredibly fast SSD with 5.5GB/s raw bandwidth. This is faster than anything that is available out there. How can developers take advantage of this? How does this compare to Series X’s 2.4GB/s raw bandwidth?

It’s hard to say universally how this would make a difference. We also can’t say anything which compromises how things like development SDKs make usage of these features or functionalities. What we will say is that file-writing and file-reading operations are obviously enhanced greatly by this; this is good for a number of things, including asset bundling/loading, or even file saving/loading. The main effect we’d say this has which would be noticeable on a consumer end is speeding up load times.

"A playthrough, I estimate. would take around 8-9 hours."

There is a difference in the Zen 2 CPUs of both next-gen consoles. The Xbox Series X features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.8GHz whereas the PS5 features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz. Your thoughts on this difference?

There isn’t much to say about this difference. Performance of the game will be virtually the same on both systems. With more stylized indie games or games with 2D portions, these specifications are never going to make as big of a difference as they are for bigger AAA graphics-dependent titles.

The Xbox Series S features lesser hardware compared to Xbox Series X, and Microsoft is pushing it as a 1440p/60fps console. Do you think it will be hold up for the graphically intensive next-gen games?

Since it’s already known that the Series S will not be running games in 4K, I am curious myself to see if the more graphically intense Series X games will have any sort of reduced graphic quality in order to run on Series S.

If some games do need to have their graphics tweaked down a bit in order to run at 60 fps on Series S, I hope they are able to include an option on these games to increase the quality of the graphics to Series X-levels, at the cost of a 30 fps cap, like certain games on Xbox One X did, such as Forza Horizon 4.

What resolution and frame rate will your game run at on PS5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S?

The game’s native version was based around a 1080p resolution, so anything higher than that would be upscaled. The game should run universally at 60 fps on console.