Zack Zero: Hopeless or Hero?

Zulrog and his henchmen have kidnapped your beloved.  You have to find her, rescuing her from Zulrog’s secret and heavily defended base.  Sound familiar?  It should.  Surprisingly though Zack Zero, developed by Crocodile Entertainment, isn’t as ordinary as it sounds.  Essentially, Zack Zero is a 2D platformer set in a 3D environment.  Instead of simply scrolling side to side, Zack Zero guides you along a set path set in a 3D environment… sort of.  The fixed camera action keeps Zack moving left to right and vice versa as he carves his way through each level.  The 2D levels are layered ala Little Big Planet to add an extra bit of depth to the platformer.  Even baddies will show up in numbers to attack from all angles, and you can fight them in 3D space… sort of.

When I say the camera is fixed, I mean it.  You can’t move it at all.  Many 2D games today allow a small bit of control over the camera using the right stick, allowing players to look up, down, left, and right to aid in finding items, secret paths and traps.  I found it frustrating when trying to find extra’s only to fall to my death because I couldn’t look down to see the correct path to take.  The camera will also try to guide you… sort of, which is fine if you’re speed running the level but it can be irritating when trying to climb up and to the right looking for treasures while the camera is zoomed into the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

Combat in Zack Zero is interesting… sort of.  Zack has a ranged attack where he throws out two Tron-like discs and an up-close and personal melee attack to sock-it-to Zulrog’s goons.  When engaging multiple enemies I found Zack would often attack an enemy that I was not focusing my attention on which lead to extra damage being taken and often times extra deaths.  On top of the deadly frisbees, Zack also has 3 elemental abilities that he can activate with the D-pad.  Each elemental ability has its strengths and unique powers.  Ice slows down time and freezes enemies, fire allows Zack to launch fireballs and earth provides super strength.  Varied use of Zack’s powers in combat triggers the combo multiplier that will greatly boost your score, thus improving your ranking on the online leaderboard.  Use of all three powers is essential to solving puzzles and navigating through the level environments.   At the start of the game, you’ll have all of Zack’s abilities to experiment with but will soon be stripped of all of your powers.  As you progress through the stages Zack’s suit will level up and unlock more of his abilities. By exploring each level, you can collect green orbs scattered throughout the game that will assist in upgrading Zack’s suit.

Exploration of the levels is essential to finding all of the secret goodies in Zack Zero.  Exploration though can be a frustrating experience given the rigid camera and floaty controls.  To me, the controls felt a little sloppy, not as tight and precise as I prefer and as you would expect in a platformer, miscalculated jumps are almost always punished with certain death.  Thankfully each level has an abundant amount of well placed checkpoints so I never felt the nerd rage that usually accompanies failure from control issues.

Zack Zero is a pretty average experience all around.  While it is pretty, albeit cartoony, for a PSN title it doesn’t really do anything new.  The integration of the elemental powers into the puzzles and level design is certainly clever but the game is really let down by the controls and glitches I experienced which included frame rate stutters and crashes.  The story is super hammed up and I did find it mildly amusing but it is nothing out of the ordinary.  The game is $12.99 and while you could do worse, you could also do quite a lot better considering what games are available on PSN.