Night Slashers: Remake Review (Switch eShop)

Upon first boot, Night Slashers: Remake introduces itself within a mock 4:3 arcade screen bezel, where the first character appears against beautifully drawn scenery, trailed by awesome flesh-decayed zombies. At this point, we thought, “Damn, this looks great.” A moment later, the screen flashed into full widescreen, revealing the actual makeover, and informing us that we had been momentarily fooled by the original arcade graphics. The redrawn aesthetic, in contrast, is a giant leap down.

This anecdote tells you all you need to know about the biggest issue of this remake of Data East's beat 'em up: its visuals are astoundingly tasteless. And no, it’s not a nostalgia issue. The graphics of the far superior arcade original are replaced with an art style that looks reminiscent of stiff, early-'00s Flash games. The new, shadow-puppet-like sprites lack depth, and their overly smooth limbs seem to float about in rest animations and skate unusually across the floor.

After some time you do begin to adjust and let yourself get into the game — which remains enjoyable — but, like the ugly Snow Bros. remake, it feels like the developer went to a whole lot of trouble for no good reason. There are options to increase saturation and gamma, which help a bit, and retro filters that do very little at all, with one appearing to corrupt the graphics by way of clumsily forced pixelation. As an aside, and for some inexplicable reason, visual adjustments from the menu can’t be seen in real time because pausing the game casts the screen in black and white.

Night Slasher’s main hook is its horror theme, blending ideas from Shelley, Stoker, Universal Studio’s monster classics, and of course Romero’s zombie legacy. Typically Japanese, it features werewolves in Teen Wolf-style American baseball jackets, eccentric literary caricatures, and sufficiently zany plotting. It’s a fun departure from the gritty '80s streets that typified the arcade belt-scrolling genre of the time and, more importantly, it always looked great, with trucks ploughing through zombie hordes and bodybags spilling off of mortuary shelves.

And, while the new aesthetic is a step back, there are still positives to this remake. On its arcade release in 1993, Night Slashers was censored in Western regions and certain parts of Asia - but now it’s gorier than ever. Blood sprays like a severed artery and bodies melt and splatter under a hail of fists. There’s also a reworked soundtrack to enjoy, and it's mostly good; but if you prefer the heavyweight synth of the original it can be easily toggled at the options screen. There are now special bonuses unlocked through play, too, including a range of colour palette swaps for your team, and a custom mode where you can tailor your game by switching certain functions on and off. A brand new character, Liu Feilin, joins the monster melee with a nice set of attacks, and four-player co-op is an option for the first time.

Most important, though, are the combat enhancements. These include new or redesigned moves that expand each character's play style quite a bit. You can charge up to fling supernatural projectiles, or engage screen-spanning slide attacks - and grabs can now optionally and usefully throw assailants forward. Should you be locked under a hail of fists, you can now breakout of the pattern by wiggling the directions, a bit like recovering from a dizzy spell in Street Fighter.

On top of this, enemies that collide with screen’s edge will bounce, allowing you to juggle them for plenty of mid-air damage. You can still do all the original’s cool stuff, too, like slamming zombies into the ground and then stomping on their head, as well as dashing, leaping, and creating a real monster mash with basic tap combos.

Critically, the total overhaul of the difficulty balancing makes for a much friendlier console experience, and this is a welcome decision. The original arcade game is tough for newcomers, and requires time to understand all its (admittedly deep) combat nuance. The remake lowers the entry bar, curbing enemy resilience and regularly doling out extra lives. You also take far less damage when receiving a hit, and your super attacks (traded for a portion of your health) are much more powerful. For some, the default difficulty may now be too easy, but there are options to scale it up through several levels, until you’re dealing with literal hordes of undead.

What bothers us, though, is a very minor sluggishness as a result of the game’s overly smooth pseudo animation, and noticeable deficiencies in the AI. Most enemies seem easily dispatched by a quick tap combo, and line up to go down via the simplest possible method. Additionally, with the rock man boss of stage two, if you stand about central to the sprite, he’ll often punch through you. This kind of looseness seems present in places that it wasn’t originally - possibly intentionally, possibly a byproduct of the visual change up and reduced acuity of your foes. We also got stuck on the Game Over screen twice, unable to get out without a hard reset, and this definitely needs a patch.

It’s true that video games aren’t just skin deep. Graphics do not make a game, and that remains true here. With all of its combat changes and more encouraging challenge, it’s a fun game to play if you enjoy horror-themed arcade action, despite being a short-lived campaign.

However, when you’re remaking a game that already has a very attractive visual style, it’s important to either improve on or maintain it. While Night Slashers: Remake fails in this regard, its worst crime is not offering an option to play the new version of the game with the original graphics.

That leaves prospective buyers with a difficult option: purchase this, at a relatively inexpensive price, and enjoy the new mechanical adjustments while squinting away the mucky redesign; or stick with the great-looking original arcade game and make do with a significantly steeper level of challenge. The fact that the Johnny Turbo's Arcade port of the original was delisted in 2023 might make that decision easier, but you will be missing out on the best-looking version.