MOTORSLICE

Publisher: Top Hat Studios Inc

Developer: Regular Studio

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Price: $19.99

I've made fun of gooners multiple times on this platform, but I want you to know that it's not because I'm some kind of Puritan. I'm a red-blooded man like anyone else...well, anyone else who...is a man... 

The difference is that I don't think a remake of a game is bad just because a character goes down a cup size. I also don't accuse female characters who I personally don't find attractive of having "man faces." I also also don't think a mid game like Stellar Blade is magically good just because there are bodacious badonkadonks on screen all the time. I also also also don't post weird fanart of little anime girls from gacha games. 

I'm getting a little off track, but my point-

Oh, and I've actually had some success with women in my time.

-is that most of us are gooners to some degree, it's just a matter ***of*** degree. And I bring this up because I have a somewhat shameful confession to make. My decision to give MOTORSLICE a chance was...let's say 51% driven by the main character. Not her looks, mind you, but her attitude. And yes, you can be a gooner about personality. 

Anyway, I'd stumbled across a video about this game, got a glimpse of that personality, saw that the gameplay seemed like it could conceivably be fun, and decided I needed to at least give it a shot.

And I'm glad I did.

MOTORSLICE is one of those games that will either endlessly piss you off or capture your heart in spite of some brutal flaws. I'm in the latter camp, and it actually has little to do with my original motivation.

MOTORSLICE takes place in a quasi-post-apocalyptic world where sentient machines called "motors" have taken over.

I'm going to stop you there for a second, dear reader. You've already misunderstood me. You read that opening sentence and thought "robots" or "androids."

No.

They're not robots or androids.

They're construction equipment. Everything from little cranes to bulldozers.

Back to it: in this world, there are special warriors called "slicers" who venture forth with one goal: ascend the megastructures that house the motors and kill them all. You follow a slicer named "P" on her quest, and I chose my words there intentionally. Because while you're controlling P, you aren't technically playing as her. 

Instead, you're playing as her follower, Orbie - a little drone that serves as a camera, flashlight, and mute companion. 

P and Orbie climb the structure in which the game takes place and kill machines. The narrative is as simple as that. There's quite a bit of implied lore to be found in the game's many optional conversations, but don't come to this hoping for any kind of codex to keep track of it all. We're simply In Media Res and along for the ride!

With all that in mind, the heart and soul of this story is the connection between our two characters. Scattered across the levels, you'll have the opportunity to take breaks and briefly "converse" with P...which ultimately means that P will talk at you for a little bit until you can "respond." You don't actually communicate your responses, they're just there to give Orbie a bit of personality and convey some sort of meaning in the beeps and boops.

You have two options to choose from when it's your turn to "talk."

The first option is no-nonsense and mission-focused. You'll tell P to stop screwing around and get back to work. Or you might tell her to leave a piece of old world technology alone because it isn't part of the mission. So that's there if you're insufferably boring that's how you want to play it.

The second option, though, is where the fun starts. These options allow you to be, without exaggeration, the Biggest. Simp. Of. All. Time. 

In one instance, you'll say something to the effect of "PLEASE LIE DOWN IN THE GRASS AND HOLD ME IN YOUR ARMS!!!" 

In another, you'll simply say "I LOVE YOU" as a complete non sequitur to whatever the conversation was about. 

If these were voice lines I would find this behavior more uncomfortable than anything. Like Mineta from My Hero Academia, you know? But you're a little drone screaming its little lungs out on the inside,  practically thanking P for the sunrise. And she doesn't understand any of that, so all the while, she's playfully condescending to you. Something about that is inexplicably funny to me. 

I could've done without the one part where the gooner option was "SNIFF SNIFF," but c'est la vie. 

On to gameplay, now! MOTORSLICE is a combination third-person slasher and platformer, with the platforming taking the lion's share of the gameplay loop. 

So, let's start small with the slasher side of things.

P wields a special chainsaw, and its combat use is twofold: slicing and parrying. Slicing is self-explanatory, while parrying is simply slicing at the same time that a motor attacks. 

As you no doubt surmised from that sentence, combat itself is about as simple as combat gets. There are some motors that are slightly too big to take down this way, however, so defeating them involves doing the titular motorslicing.

Which gives us a decent segue into the platforming side of things. "Motorslicing" involves sticking the chainsaw in a special kind of wall and using it to pull yourself along that wall. It's used for some of the longer challenges as a way of gaining an insane amount of altitude or forward distance quickly. It's also used to "platform" across larger enemies. In these cases, the goal is to motorslice for a certain amount of time until the health bar is whittled down.

Aside from the motorslicing, you also have a suite of traversal options as straightforward as the combat. That is to say: you jump, you slide, and you wall run. But lest you misunderstand me, each level does something fresh and cool with these actions. So despite the fact that your moveset is as limited as some of the earliest platformers, it never becomes stale.

One level, for instance, introduces areas with massive amounts of landmines. These prevent your use of the ground, so you end up needing to find ways to circumvent these hazards using everything else in an area. 

Another level involves the strategic use of giant fans to get around. So, there's lots of variety to be discovered.

There are two things left to note about the platforming. 

Firstly, this isn't about precision. If you jump from one beam to another, you're generally going to stick the landing. Same with swinging from monkey bars. The game doesn't want you to be concerned about how firmly you press the jump button or how much you hold the left stick forward. 

In this same vein, walls that are required to reach the next area are usually denoted with little climbing marks. Before you roll your eyes, it's very easy to get lost in these levels, so this treatment is basically required.

But the second thing to note is that the challenges are hard in spite of everything I've said. There's a little death counter when you reach the end credits, and over my 12ish hours with MOTORSLICE, I died 431 times. 431 deaths in a platformer where the important walls are marked and you almost always stick the landing when you jump between items. 

And while it's possible that I'm a sleeper agent for IGN, I don't think I am. Some maneuvers are difficult to pull off, and you can't fall very far without dying. Hell, you can't drop a human's height without taking damage unless you hold the "safe landing" button. 

Further contributing to the difficulty is the fact that all but the most basic enemies' attacks are one-hit kills. But platforming is what's gonna do it most often.

Unfortunately, not every death feels fair. One unfortunate problem with MOTORSLICE is the finickiness which which P determines whether she runs UP a wall or ACROSS it. She needs to be facing the wall to run up, while facing parallel will have her run across. But I sometimes found it incredibly difficult to get the angle right if the camera wasn't facing the same direction she's supposed to be facing. Even doing that wasn't a guaranteed success, though. I guess it could be that she rotates too slowly, or maybe the angle windows for each wall interaction type are too narrow for their own good? I guess that would invalidate my earlier assertion that this isn't a "precision" platformer, but it really doesn't feel like precision plays much of a role here. Almost every time I got frustrated with MOTORSLICE, it was specifically because of this problem.

It's a crying shame, because when P is having to execute multiple wall actions in a gauntlet, the challenge design is picture-perfect. Not uncomplicated. Not easy. But expertly-curated. 

Gauntlets like these don't have the coded guardrails of certain platforming actions. It's just that the distances between walls and obstacles are perfectly calculated so that you can pull things off if you're reactive and paying attention...sometimes even on a first try! 

But again, it's sometimes spoiled by the clunkiness. Challenges can be as brilliantly crafted as possible, but if you're having trouble getting P to run the correct way, that's kind of a moot point. 

If the platforming itself weren't so endlessly fun to do, or if this problem showed up more frequently than it did, it's safe to say I wouldn't have given MOTORSLICE much of my time.

Now, we have one last gameplay facet to discuss, and it's one that incorporates both platforming and combat: the boss battles. 

Aside from the chapter 4 boss (which is bullshit because of the issues with the wall actions), the boss roster is *chef's kiss*. 

These particular machines are large. Too large to be defeated just by swinging a chainsaw at them. So, how do you take them down?

With platforming. 

Remember motorslicing? How you stick the chainsaw into a wall and use it to get around? That's how you emerge victorious. The very act of platforming is the boss battle, and not in a Shadow of the Colossus way where the platforming is in service of getting to a weak point. No...the journey is the weak point! You'll pull off complicated maneuvers, all of which usually involve some motorslicing, and the battle is won when you've destroyed all the destructible pieces. 

The design chops on display are astounding. But I'll leave it to your no-doubt capable reasoning, dear reader. Does the idea of killing a flying, sentient choo-choo train by chainsaw riding its cars to death miles and miles above the ground sound cool?

That chapter 4 boss really is terrible, though. Just look up a video if you get stuck, because you shouldn't let it prevent you from seeing the rest of the game. 

On the subject of seeing, one aspect of MOTORSLICE that may be a turn-off for some is the visual design. Every level looks exactly the same. 

The challenges, architecture, and general concept are always different, but the color palette and textures literally never change even once between levels. Remember how I said a video brought this game to my attention? That video showed the final boss fight. But I had no idea, because the area in that part of the video looked identical to the introduction. That's how egregious the lack of color variety is. You're going to be seeing more white and orange than you ever thought possible by the time the credits roll. 

If that were the end of this complaint, that would be one thing...but the color palette actually has an effect so obvious that I have to wonder how it went overlooked. When you're in a cutscene or dialogue segment, you move to the next piece of that cutscene/segment but pressing a button when a "forward" icon appears. This icon is pure white. So when placed in a scene that's majority white (as most of them are), that icon basically disappears, and you'll be watching the screen wondering if it's time to press the button. Not a huge thing, but it's weird that it wasn't noticed in QA.

The color palette isn't the only thing you'll be seeing with impossible frequency, however. You'll also get that experience with walkways! Each level sits above the previous one in the megastructure, and in order to reach the next one, you have to climb a tower, then walk along a long, suspended walkway to reach another tower. Climbing the towers isn't a big deal. Neither is traversing the walkways, in theory...

But I timed it, and it takes two and a half full minutes of walking to cross them. TWO. AND. A. HALF. MINUTES! Of just walking in a straight line. Was the goal here to create a sense of scale? To give the next level time to load in without actually putting up a loading screen? I don't know, but this particular bit of weirdness got to me every time. Eventually there starts to be motorslice-able sides to these walkways that cut down the time by about half...but at that point, it's the same nagging question again: why?

So, that's annoying...and another annoying aspect to MOTORSLICE is its soundtrack. It's the same one or two tracks (I think it's just one) repeated over and over again. The best way I can think to describe it is that it's like a more annoying version of the first level's OST in Neon White. Eventually I got used to it...but that's not exactly glowing praise.

These are not-insignificant issues, but they all revolve around technical design. In terms of technical fidelity, this game is as solid as they come. No frame drops, no glitches, no hard or soft crashes, and perhaps most surprisingly, no animation problems. Given MOTORSLICE's AA nature and the general wonkiness, I would've bet money that there'd be at least one animation problem as P jumps from wall to wall. 

But nope. I'd be out that money. That's why I don't gamble. 

As you've undoubtedly noticed, MOTORSLICE is far from flawless. It frustrated me from time-to-time, and if we're being honest, I wouldn't be surprised if I found amateur-hour coding beneath the hood. It isn't a well-made game...*sigh*...except in a lot of ways it is. That's more frustrating than any of the challenges that regularly killed me. 

The challenges themselves are designed flawlessly, and the bosses are inspired in some cases. Beyond that, there's an undeniable wellspring of love put into this project in everything from the world to our heroine. It's just that this game can't shake the stench of its budget and/or its developers' lack of experience.

Interestingly enough, though...this is the second game in 2026 that I've broken my nightly routine for in order to keep playing. The first was Saros: an expertly-assembled title that currently sits at the foot of the GOTY throne. MOTORSLICE is...not that. Yet it still captured my heart. Warts and all. 

So, maybe it'll do the same to you? If it sounds too frustrating, then it probably will be. But if you're curious, then I'd like to recommend you pick it up ASAP. Even if for no other reason than you want to be called a good orb.

Let us review:

Clunkiness with wall actions - 1.0

Chapter 4 boss - 1.0

Technical design flaws - 1.0

The final score for MOTORSLICE is...

7.0/10 - Good