MOTORSLICE is an action-adventure title set inside the ruins of a megastructure. Players take control of ‘P’, a girl on a routine job that involves infiltrating, eliminating machines, and getting out alive. But as luck would have it, everything goes wrong, and P must now parkour her way up the megastructure to find a way out, without help from the outside, while destroying colossal out-of-control machines.
The hour-long demo takes place shortly after P arrives at the megastructure. From playing the demo, you get a proper preview of everything you can expect from the full game. What stood out to me about the demo was how it changed a few of my expectations. Some things surprised me, some things that somewhat annoyed me. But I did learn to adapt and adjust to how the developers likely would have liked us to play it.
Going into the demo, I expected something like Mirror’s Edge with a few combat encounters sprinkled here and there. As it turns out, the parkour had a bit of nuance that was jarring at first, and the megastructure has this level of complexity that made the idea of exploration both exciting and utterly terrifying.
I don’t know why I expected this game to have smooth parkour movement as if the rules of parkour were etched into stone. I expected the movement to be more automatic and moving from point to point as fluidly as possible. But has not been the case in the demo. There is a lot more freedom in movement, with your next move following what your screen points to as “forward”. After I understood the difference in intentions, movement became a lot more predictable. In other words, I was no longer following a set of animations from one point to another; I was carving the path to where I wanted to go, how I wanted to get there. Sure, the game still has an intended path, but getting around was not as unforgiving as I initially thought.
The best of the part of the demo was traversing gaps using the chainsaw (or what I would call the chain sword). When using the move on the right surface, P can use her sword to slice through the surface like a pair of scissors. And like a pair of scissors, you can alter your direction as you move forward. This is one of the most unique features of the game that’s used as a tool of traversal and a weapon against colossal enemies. More on when I talk about the boss encounter.
The combat encounters were fast and decisive. There was none of that health bar, bullet sponge nonsense present here. Enemies go down in one of two swings if you catch them off guard. That also means that you go down in one or two hits as well. This makes combat dodging an essential part of the game. I suspect that staying still could be a fatal mistake, especially if you ever find yourself in a situation surrounded by more than a couple of enemies.
The chain sword’s not as visceral as a Warhammer 40k chain sword, but it gets the job done – slicing enemies in half like they were blocks of wood. Contrary to what’s seen in the demo, I doubt ripping metal apart can result in anything other than sparks and metal flakes. It’s certainly not going to be as clean as plasma burns from a Star Wars lightsaber,
Unfortunately, the only enemies the demo had were the excavators. They were there mostly to showcase the fluid and lethal combat. But apart from the occasional frontal attack, they didn’t pose much of a danger. Now, the game did show other enemies like disc throwers that you can parry and probably throw back. I hope to face more enemy types that require a bit of thinking to take down effectively.
The highlight of the demo was the boss fight at the end. The closest way to describe it was like taking on a Colossus from Shadow of the Colossus, if that Colossus was an Earthmover dump truck the size of an apartment building.
Scaling up this beast required us to go past the tires and under the chassis, where three pipes are literally there for you to climb up. Once on board, you’re supposed to navigate your way upwards until you reach the very top. Interestingly, as P was making her way to the top, she was actually doing damage to the massive machine. Every sliceable surface counts as a segment of the machine’s overall health. I didn’t know it at the time, but every surface I was slicing through on the way to the top, I was actually doing damage.
It was only when I was on top, where the command unit was located, that I realized that I was cutting the machine up like a stuffed turkey. Seeing the machine fall apart the way it did was the highlight after an hour of figuring out how to move around.
Apart from the combat and parkour, there is a third element of the game I am curious about – the slice-of-life aspect. I saw snippets of it during the demo, but without the full context, I didn’t understand much. Basically, it is a series of cutscenes framed as conversations about the daily life of a ‘Slicer’. The idea itself is fine. I just wish that the locations where these conversations take place were a bit more distinct and not another random location in a sea of metal and sand.
There’s a lot to look forward to in MOTORSLICE, but there are some things that warrant some concern. First, I am not completely sold on the obstacle aspect of the parkour. The parkour took some getting used to, but it’s a lot better when it all starts to click. The traps, on the other hand, could use some adjustments. For starters, the spike traps have hitboxes that are way too big. Even in moments I thought I was clear, the slightest snag on my picky toe was enough to send me back to the checkpoint. Thankfully, there seems to be a generous spread of checkpoint locations. That’s all well and good, provided everything goes as it should.
I actually ran into a heck of a bug that threw me for a loop. At some point in the demo, I died and was somehow magically teleported to the foot of the boss encounter. I don’t know what triggered it, but I didn’t like it one bit. I realized later on, when I restarted the demo, that I skipped over a significant portion of the entire level. I really hope that this is a problem exclusive to the demo of the game.
MOTORSLICE is shaping up to be more than just Mirror’s Edge if Faith Connors were rendered in low-poly and carried a chain sword. I may have had a rough start with the demo, but I walked away with a better appreciation of the game and what it’s trying to accomplish. I am looking forward to this game’s release on May 5th, 2026.
