Night Slashers: Remake – PS5 Review 1

Night Slashers: Remake is an update of the well-regarded 1993 beat ’em up from Data East and is brought to us by the safe pair of hands that is Forever Entertainment who are behind a lot of remakes such as 2020’s Panzer Dragoon: Remake and 2022’s House of the Dead one.

The original arcade game was a bloody affair with three playable heroes taking on an army of undead foes and various creatures ripped straight from horror history.  Mummies, golems, vampires and zombies all waiting to be booted in the face with a swift flying kick as you travel through the game’s seven stages.  If you’ve ever played Final Fight, Double Dragon or anything like that, this was pretty much more of the same but with that horror styling, well-designed massive sprites and a decent move-set.

For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, the game had you walking from left to right taking out monsters with melee attacks.  You only have three controls to worry about.  Attack is context sensitive and will see you kicking and punching enemies depending on range (also, downed enemies can be kicked in the head).  The jump button is only really used for combat too as the game doesn’t really have obstacles and traps to worry about.  But it does let you unleash your inner Bruce Lee with flying kicks.  This is all explained by a detailed tutorial.  Unfortunately, the tutorial isn’t interactive (even though it looks like it should be) but you’ll get the idea.

The other control is for your special attack (originally accessed by pressing attack and jump together on the original two-button coin-op).  This damages all on-screen enemies but at a cost of a little of your health.   You can remap the controls but the mappings don’t stick between playthroughs.  So you’ll have to do it every time but it does at least stay consistent during a playthrough.

This remake doesn’t mess with the original game’s formula.  The game is essentially the same as it ever was, albeit with a visual makeover but this isn’t a lazy port at all.  Firstly, they’ve added a new character, Liu Feilin (from Data East’s Fighter’s History series) who brings a fresh set of moves.  Also, her appearance has given them the opportunity to up the local co-op from three (as it was on the coin-op) to four which is a neat touch.  There’s no online co-op though which is a real shame.

Generally speaking, this is such a standard beat ’em up that it should appeal to fans of the genre.  The action is fun and fast for the most part and not quite as credit-munchingly bad as something like Final Fight.  That said, there are some jumps in difficulty and tricky boss moments but you do get a choice of five difficulties to play at so everybody should be well-catered for.  You can also restart the game from any completed level which is a nice touch.

Fans of the original might not be so sure though as there are a few niggles to the game.  The collision detection can be unpredictable and the grabbing mechanic is a little hit and miss too, so there’s just a slight inconsistency to the game at times.  Also, the boss battles can be awkward because sometimes their reactions can be inconsistent too.  Attacks that should hurt them won’t sometimes or they’ll twat you when you do something that previously worked.  The section where the foreground is on fire was particularly frustrating just because of how fiddly the difference between success and failure could be.

Also, the new visual style might be divisive.  The original game had lovely detailed pixelised characters and it looked great.  This game uses a smoother, clean style which looks quite cartoony.  It uses a halftone print effect which is quite nice but in comparison to the original, it’s all just a little bit safe.  It’s not ugly as such but just a bit generic.  That said, it’s so weird that they never included the original visuals as an option as we’re pretty sure that most people would have picked that option.  Or, of course, they could have just included the whole original game as at the moment the only way to play that is via the streaming service Antstream Arcade.

The price, a very fair £7.99, is pretty good though (even if you can get through a playthrough in around half an hour and there aren’t many reasons to do it all again) and while fans of the original game might feel a little let down, beat ’em up fans in general should get their money’s worth out of this remake.