Released on November 1st, 1993, Night Slashers was one of its kind. While most beat 'em ups at the time were exploring urban scenarios or medieval themes, Data East was bold enough to try something new for the genre, bringing elements of horror to beat 'em ups.
Horror and beat 'em ups are indeed two genres that do not fit very well together. Horror always comes with a feeling of helplessness and beat 'em ups empowers the player. Despite that, Data East did an excellent job by giving the player an uneasy feeling, especially when hordes of up to ten, or more, enemies are on the screen. Night Slashers also presents huge bosses, based on popular monsters, that can make you stop in your tracks to assess the situation before starting the brawl.
Gore, Not Fear.
I don't think fear and dread were the developers' intention when creating this game. Night Slashers, despite the zombies and monsters, seem to be influenced way more by games like Mortal Kombat, which started the trend of depicting extreme violence in video games. Here, what will drive your attention, is the unprecedented amount of blood and gore that you can extract from your enemies, making even games like the original Mortal Kombat blush in comparison. Decapitations, bodies exploding, guts falling from the enemy's belly... Night Slashers has it all, and it is all depicted with a lot of pixelated details. And detail is something that is aplenty in this game. The amazing art style, the huge sprites, everything in this game was made in a way that it wouldn't be possible for you to miss a single drop of blood splattering on your screen. It is an amazing and gory visual experience and a pretty good beat 'em up. So much, so that even decades after its original release, the game was revisited by fans, improving, in some ways, the experience.
Night Slashers X
With the popularization of the Open Bor engine, it was just a matter of time before someone decided to make a version of Data-East's classic. Night Slashers X was released in 2020, created by BonusJZ, featuring a lot of new moves, revamped combat, and a more challenging experience. While this new version was pretty interesting, it was a little too challenging for most people, and considering Night Slashers is already a difficult game, not everyone was pleased by it.
That was solved the next year, when a team of fans led by Oldyz decided to improve BonusJZ's version, bringing more characters, including Ash Willians from the Evil Dead movie series, new enemies, 4 players co-op, and widescreen support. Considered by many as the definitive version of the game, Night Slashers X: Rebalanced still has some bugs and some difficulty spikes that can make the whole experience a little unfair, but overall, the improvements over the original game, make up for any problem you might have, especially when considering the excellent revamped combat. Even though it is a very good game, and freely available on the internet, not everybody is willing to download an Open Bor game. They are easy to find, that's true, but you have to know where to look for them because you can end up on some very suspicious sites. Unfortunately, the Open Bor community is very widespread, and, being everything free, it is almost impossible to find a hub to safely download the files. If you are interested in Open Bor games, the best, and safest, place to find them is on the Chrono Crash website.
Night Slasher: Remake
Fan games are always nice, the amount of work the developers put into their games, without earning anything from it, is outstanding, but while they can be even better than the original creation, nothing can surpass the hype when the company behind the source material decides to step in and make their own take modernizing a classic. Announced this last Halloween, Night Slashers: Remake brings back the original game with a new art style, new OST, and lots of other improvements. The game is being developed by the Polish studio Storm Trident and will be published by Forever Entertainment. If Storm Trident doesn't ring any bells for you, they are best known for the recently released Front Mission 2 Remake, which currently has overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam. But that's not all. A big chunk of the team is comprised of the same folks that made Skinny and Franko, another extremely brutal and gory beat 'em up, that we highly recommend. Storm Trident is, actually, a team put together by Blue Sunset Games and Forever Entertainment.
As expected, the change in the artistic direction, caused a little uproar in the beat 'em up community with some negative comments about the art style. After reading some of these comments, I decided to talk to Sebastian, the project's lead developer, about what was going on and he assured me that we hadn't seen anything yet. As stated in the trailer, this is a work in progress and, I assume, they didn't want to miss the Halloween date and put together the small teaser trailer that is now available. According to Sebastian, the game will feature a ton of special effects, like water puddles that react to your steps and dust moving out of the way while you walk. The developers are also preparing an amazing lightning engine, that will enrich the game's visual.
Despite some initial negative reactions, I am now seeing a lot of positive feedback about the game art style. In my channel, you can find way more positive impressions than negative ones, which means the developer is going in the right direction. And let's be honest, art style is important, but you know deep down that what really matters is the combat. While there's no word about how the combat will play out, the original game, as we stated, has a pretty solid one. The press release states the game will feature improved combat mechanics, but this is too vague and can mean anything, from a new button layout to new moves.
It is hard to tell how close we are to the release date because, while the game was announced two years ago, the team, or at least part of it, was busy with Skinny and Franko, and Front Mission Remake. According to some information I got, only now the lead developer can give his full attention to the game. No matter when the game is released, you can be sure that I will cover every step of the way and will bring you every piece of news that we can get.
Teaser Trailer:
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