Spoiler File
(297.7KB, 2560x1440) Well, I 100%ed MotorSlice. The in-game payoff is miserable for what you put in, as your reward for collecting all 250 drones is a three-sentence popup. Steamfags and console players don't even get a pity achievement for it. Sure, you get to see some neat areas of the map, but getting to them means bumping against every unpleasant quirk of the movement system.
Really, whether you'll like this depends on four things: how little you care about a satisfying story; whether you like P's movement or not; how heartbroken you are that the game's bosses don't live up to Shadow of the Colossus'; and if it bothers you that a parkour game set in a single big, interconnected structure is so linear.
The premise is that you're a bored tomboy named P with a chainsword and her camera drone named Orbie, and you're both just doing your job of clearing out malfunctioning construction robots from a subsection of a larger megastructure. Her usual operator cuts out from interference shortly after you enter the game's array structure, leaving the two of you alone to wander and wonder about things. The dev calls it a slice of life game sometimes, and pun aside, that's pretty much all the story is. Is there any significance to this particular structure? What's going on in the wider setting? Is P as boring as her initial impression? Some things get partial answers, a little context is given in the ending, and a lot is either completely absent or left to the player to piece together. What writing there is ranges from kind of meh to bad Brazilian thirstposting, so it ends up feeling more like a half-baked story than a minimal one.
The movement I talked about in >>112939 still suffers from most of the same issues, despite the dev making a large overhaul to the demo's movement several months ago. Regular jumps are no longer as floaty and have more air control, but whether you activate a wallrun, a walljump, or a vertical walljump when you're along a wall remains finnicky. Which of these is triggered is dependent on this very awkward combination of your movement inputs, your camera angle, and your magnetism towards walls, ledges, cracks, pipes, and poles. It honestly never felt completely right to me over my 22 hours of playtime, and orb collecting often felt less like a skill challenge than a bunch of edge cases designed to make the wallrun/walljump/vertical walljump trifecta feel more inconsistent than usual. The vast majority of my deaths came from these, and from looking at screenshots of other players' results screens, it looks like trying to collect any significant number of orbs is pretty much guaranteed to send your death count rocketing up into the high hundreds. There's some other niggles, such as the way P can't walk off a ledge and drop straight down, but they're a lot easier to consistently work around.
P's propensity to throw herself off walls in exactly the way you don't want is probably a big part of why the game's SotC-wannabe bosses never try to shake you off once you're aboard. There is no way P's movement could handle that, so the majority are designed so they're essentially static level geometry for you to platform on. Their size is impressive, and they're intimidating when you're on the ground, but man, are they a letdown once get a foothold.
With the bosses cut down to size, the biggest thing MotorSlice has going for it is its megastructure. I complained in my demo writeup that it felt like window dressing around a linear obstacle course, but thankfully I have to retract the first part. What I assumed was skybox around self-contained levels is actually the rest of the level. The way you get through it is linear, sure (not counting side areas or any skips you find), but that linear path takes you through the majority of the sub-structure you're in. Your path also generally trends upwards, and you get enough stellar views that you gain this really satisfying sense of progress as you look down on previous areas and the wreckage of bosses you've slain. Sometimes you can even see the little platform you started out on, and watch it shrink into the sands as you ascend to the clouds. Granted, I think the game could have made much better use of that megastructure and the parkour if the level design were more open-ended, but a lot of people are likely fine with that. I've just been a bit spoiled by Peripeteia on my end.
In general what I got out of MotorSlice was disappointing, but not enough for me to drop it and demand a refund from GOG. Even with the lackluster story, painful movement I never liked even when I had the hang of it, and bosses I pitied more than anything, I enjoyed some of the neat areas I stumbled across and seeing how the structure connected. This was enough to keep going. My favourite areas usually ended up being the optional ones, and I liked some of them enough that I took my time and dealt with the pain instead of beelining it straight to the end. I get why this thing is really popular, and also why a lot of my friends hated it way more than I did, but personally, I'll take flawed yet interesting anime games like this over tranny garbage and AAA trash anyday.