Thanks to Forever Entertainment for the review code

Title: Night Slashers: Remake
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 09/26/2024

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Story

In this remake of the Data East Arcade brawler, you take control of one of four characters, all setting out to stop the zombie epidemic by seeking out the root cause of it. Outside of the new character and more dialogue between levels, there isn’t really much added to the game, so the plot here is just as simple as it was back then, which didn’t bug me.

Presentation

Right off the bat, the weirdest thing about this game is how the intro plays. It starts off by showing the original game’s graphics in a very blurry, faux Arcade border, before transitioning to the new remake style, as if the game is trying to show it off as a gargantuan, shocking improvement over the original. It is not.

The biggest elephant in the room, right away with Night Slashers Remake, is how this game just blatantly, desperately wants to be like Streets of Rage 4. Cel-Shaded characters? Check. 2.5D action? Check. Weird 3D models meant to look like a cartoon due to cel shading? Check. There have been many times where a game has been remade and looks bad in photos, but fine enough or even great in motion, and sadly Night Slashers Remake didn’t pull that off at all for me.

Yes, the main characters at least look decent. They look as they should, and most of their combat animations, albeit stiff, are as you remember them. The problems become very apparent as soon as you see enemy animations, or even how your characters move; it just looks incredibly weird!

I can’t describe it, the best thing I can point out with how off the movement looks is how this barbarian looking guy with an axe shows up every now and then, and whatever they did during the cel shading process didn’t work out so good, so he’s more of a 3D model than the other enemies in the game. It really looks jarring and out of place, and considering how gorgeous the Arcade original looked, with sharp pixel art and excellent backgrounds, these animations are a huge step back, especially with how strange everything looks. One moment the game feels like a natural remake, and the next it comes off like a janky brawler from the early days of Xbox Live, this Remake truly is that distracting to look at.

By far the worst visual downgrade has to be from the stage backgrounds. The backgrounds of the original game were memorable, distinct and most importantly of all, gloomy. The stage 3 boss fight was pretty darn tense and the background just perfectly fit the feeling of fighting a vampire. Here in Remake? You still have a similar background, but everything just looks so much brighter, and it completely kills the mood of the scene. I have no idea why they didn’t try to match the Arcade version more closely, but these sorts of mood/lighting differences really take a lot out of the experience, and arguably drain a lot from what made the original Night Slashers stand out visually.

Don’t even get me started on the weirdness with gore here. I’m generally not a fan of gore in games, and while the OG Night Slashers was a bit too much for me personally, it still added a distinct aspect to the game’s personality and helped your moves really feel impactful seeing bodies melt with a bloody mess to the floor. In Remake, despite the game having a ESRB rating of M, I really didn’t feel the impact here much at all, and was kinda stunned by how relatively tame the game felt in this regard. Sure the red zombie things (I never saw other colors of this enemy, despite me swearing to have seen green ones in the Arcade original) still melt into a bloody mess still with weird organs out, and enemies lose blood when you hit them, but more than once I saw enemies that I swore died a lot bloodier in the Arcade version just turning into a boring pile of goo when I defeated them, which just made me scratch my head.

Why remake a brawler known for excessive gore, if the gore is toned down to the point of being dumb looking? I’m genuinely confused why this has a ESRB M/CERO Drating, and even bumping up the difficulty didn’t make the combat feel any more intense. Just baffling presentational choices all around.

Oh well, at least the original game was known for an excellent OST, and thankfully you can play Remake with the original score enabled. But the remixes here are pretty solid as well! Nowhere as close to the excellence of the original score, but I can confidently say the remixes in Remake had a ton of care and passion put into them. I just wish the visuals had that same treatment.

Gameplay

In this game you have a simple control scheme, with a typical jump, attack and special technique button layout. Hitting Jump + Attack makes you do a stronger move, and the special technique is a powerful attack that drains some of your health while using it, so typical brawler stuff. A strange glitch right off the bat was how despite the game offering button mapping in-game, I couldn’t get my remaps to work at all while trying to change it through the in-game menu. No matter what I mapped the actions to, they just wouldn’t save, despite showing the new prompts in said control menu.

A grim sign of things to come. Anyhow, you have multiple difficulties to choose from, and can choose one of four characters to jump in the game with. One of them is brand new to Remake to give the game a four player co-op mode, and her style is based on the praying mantis, so I went with her after I lost my first save file. (more on that later) She’s fine for the most part, but even still once you get in the game you’ll quickly realize flaws apparent to not just remake, but even the original Night Slashers.

Yep, as a belt scroller, that classic repetitive nature is back. Punch and jump at enemies, do differing combos and attacks that may or may not drain your health, and defeat enemies until you hit a boss. Rinse and repeat until the stage is cleared until the game is over. Pretty standard stuff and back in my old review of the Switch port, I mentioned the same thing. With that said, I felt the balance of enemies and the challenge level in the Arcade original was rather decent, and kept you on your toes at all times. While Night Slashers Remake has many difficulty levels, and even custom options to make the game even crazier, I never really felt the same amount of tension nor impact as in the Original game.

Moves felt pretty weak, until they didn’t and a charged move cut off a big chunk of a boss’s HP bar. Enemies felt weak, even on the hardest difficulty, and the only challenge to me on that mode was moreso avoiding them vs facing the brunt of their attacks. I barely felt countered, and it wasn’t until the later half of the game that things started to finally give me that familiar resistance, even on the easiest setting. Nevertheless, the original Night Slashers was a short brawler, so thus, Remake is too. No new stages were added, and while the stages here are memorable, they’re a lot less fun with how much worse the presentation is.

The lack of impact and the very repetitive nature, just makes Night Slashers Remake a complete and utter bore. I eventually just threw my hands up and binged the whole game on the easiest setting while watching a Youtube video, and even by the end of that I barely remembered anything about Remake, and instead was just thinking “God, I really want to go back to the original to compare and contrast”. To make matters even more annoying, I was a little irked to see that the ending of the game was literally just the original game ending in that same blurry filter as the game’s intro.

They didn’t really seem to do much to these endings, besides add in the fourth character with some pretty OK spritework to make her fit in the old pixel style (and even give her a unique ending), but it just made me want the pixel style back for the entire game, and for a remake, that’s a bad thing for the player to be craving.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Night Slashers Remake somehow fails at keeping the fun simplicity of a retro brawler. The original wasn’t all that special, and the last port of it was pretty lacking, but at least it had a distinct look to it and some pretty cool music to keep things interesting, while here in Remake, you have an art style that feels like it wants to be Streets of Rage 4, but the game has none of the charm SOR4 has. And that ended up being how I felt about the remake as a whole, desperately wanting to be something the original Night Slashers couldn’t, and remaking it to the point of being a pretty generic looking brawler with not much special about it. The little bit of identity Night Slashers had that wasn’t the gore is just gone now, and I can’t say the game feels that great to play even after playing through it twice.

Yes, twice. I lost my save during the review process, because somehow despite having Steam Cloud enabled and showing up, it doesn’t record any bytes and thus when I moved around games to work on another game’s review, I lost my progress. This game isn’t that long to begin with, but that small experience just added to make a sloppy experience even more unpleasant. At the very least, the game is still decent enough that you and a group of friends could have some mindless fun with it, but after you clear through this game I don’t think there’s any reason to go back to this one at all, not even on a higher difficulty.

I’d say to play the original instead if you want that classic DECO experience, but if this remake’s licensing situation is anything like the Joe & Mac one that came out a few years ago, the existence of it has almost certainly caused G-Mode to withdraw future licensing rights for the original game in vein of this remake. That isn’t the fault of the pub/devs of this game at all, but it would be depressing if G-Mode felt confident enough to lock away the original experience in favor of this remake that took an average brawling experience and just completely misses the mark. The original soundtrack was at least rad to listen to while playing, but it just made me want to play the original even more, somehow, and for a Remake that’s the last thing I want to be thinking of while playing it. I really, really hope this can be salvaged in patches somehow, but I’m not really that confident.

I give Night Slashers: Remake a 4 out of 10.