Someone, somewhere, has a 1993 beat-em-up from Data East listed as one of their favorite games of all time. It’s a title you’ve probably only heard of in passing, maybe even seen in the arcade once when you were younger, but never really played.  Yet Forever Entertainment saw Night Slashers, the campy horror-themed brawler, and decided it needed to have a new life. Not just a port: they needed to do what it took to rebuild this title from the ground up. So in a world where we are eyeballs deep in immersive, detailed and complex gaming, the community is now treated to a completely nonsensical ride through all things disjointedly horror, through the lens of a fist and a riff-filled soundtrack. And Night Slashers: Remake, for the most part, it’s pretty damn fun.

You don’t need to know why four heroes have gathered together to fight the forces of darkness. I don’t mean “why should we fight evil,” that seems pretty obvious, I mean how and why they all came together. From what I can tell, monstrosities just woke up and thought “today’s the day,” and then went to work. This causes fighters from the US, England, and China to come together and kick ass, then gradually learn about each other as they travel around. Turns out the vampire lord that vaguely threatened them at the beginning of stage two actually terrorized one character as a child, but don’t worry about that. Vampire lord is just a ruse to mask the REAL baddie, who is either in Mexico or Australia, it’s not clear, and also neither is actually the captain of this whole thing. What’s happening? Who’s in charge? Doesn’t matter, don’t worry!

Side scrolling brawlers each have their own charm and appeal, and Night Slashers: Remake is no exception. Whereas some beat ’em ups are soaked in blood and violence of the sensible variety, Night Slashers: Remake chooses to lean into gore and absurdity like the slasher films of old, with desiccated zombies, melting bodies and grotesque visages appearing everywhere. While it’s certainly not to the discomfort level of something like Outlast, it was enough that the initial release did get the blood turned green when it went to the Japanese market. Sadly, you won’t have a chance to fully appreciate the classic aesthetic of how Night Slashers initially appeared, as the remake only hints at the original graphics during the beginning and end of the game: everything in between is in the remade, redone style.

For what it’s worth, the Night Slashers: Remake actually looks pretty great, leaning into brighter colors and smoother edges to give it a bit of a cartoony vibe that really matches with the level of mayhem that happens on the screen. While the pixelated effect can be added through filters, it’s best just to leave the graphics alone, possibly messing with the saturation or bloom to help give you the desired effect. I did turn on the monochromatic filter briefly to see a truly throwback horror motif of a black-and-white rampage, and it’s fun but ultimately too muted. The bevy of colors and shades gives you better context as to the location of enemies, pickups, and traps.

Gameplay itself for Night Slashers: Remake is simple enough, with only three buttons to worry about: jump, hit, and power attack. Jump and hit can be married together to make another sort of “super” move, and the power attack can hit everything in the room at the cost of a bit of your life. Getting close to enemies allows you to grapple them, at which point you may do a series of hits, or throw them to create damage to the unfortunate mob and anything they hit in their trajectory. Combos and unique button presses aren’t a concern here: simply get in there and get wailing. If you manage to pick up an item for throwing (rock, sword, flaming orb of magical incendiary pain), you’ve got only one shot to throw it and hit something: an object that misses simply sails away into the void.

The fighting of Night Slashers: Remake is good and bad in the same breath. On the one hand, a majority of the hits, especially the grabs, look like they were lifted straight out of the WWE and put into this game for the express purpose of courting players who were into the Ring back in the day. There’s nothing as absurd as a British man in suspenders suplexing a zombie, and you get to see that a whole damn lot. When the combat gets frantic, it gets explosively fun as button mashing is key to survival in these situations. Fools might want to rely on the power attack, but only do that if there’s a hot dog on the ground, as the expenditure to your life can be a major ask.

On the other hand, the difficulty of the game is very unbalanced depending on the level you choose. If you’re doing single player, dropping into Easy or Very Easy is the most enjoyable way to rampage through the game. If we’re being honest, Very Easy could be labeled “Too Easy” and convey the proper ask. I finished the game with something like fourteen spare lives in reserve, exclusively doing power attacks to round out the last couple of bosses. It turned Night Slashers: Remake into an almost relaxing jaunt through blood and nonsense, so when the finale came I was caught a bit off guard that the journey had already ended. Not a complaint, but it really lets you know where the floor was set in terms of the game’s curve.

Once you get up to normal, though, you remember this was a game designed to milk quarters out of people, and more players meant more cash. The enemies take significantly more hits, the attack patterns are more varied, and the power attacks take more life out of your meter. I don’t believe it’s possible to do Hard solo, but I’m sure someone will be able to prove me wrong in a speedrun in the coming months. Still, it’s infinitely more fun to have others join in, so plan accordingly to both meet your goals and also have a better time dealing with things like the twin guardian bosses of the Mexican level. Plus it helps to see all the different characters in action to really get a good feel for what the chaos is like.

With an updated soundtrack and graphics that I honestly don’t mind, the only part of Night Slashers: Remake that feels disjointed is the new character. Whereas Jake, Christopher, and Zhao all gelled well within the world, Feilin is an odd duck. Jake is the muscle, Zhao is the agility, Christopher is the medium balance, and Feilin seems to be a slower version of Zhao with a less exciting power attack. Additionally, her ending feels odd, like it’s meant to set up a sequel that clearly never came and also had no purpose. We defeated ALL evil in a big way, why the hell would evil then just come back three months later? It screams “we are terrible heroes.”

Having said all that, Night Slashers: Remake is a romp all unto itself, and has some earnest potential in a decent remake category. The difficulty levels give plenty of replay to what would otherwise be a very short brawler, the customized game mode lets you finesse how hard you want it to be (exploding enemy corpses is a fun addition), and the fighting is as much of a spectacle to witness as it is to experience. While enemy density is odd and the errant graphical glitch can catch you off guard, there’s real fun here, and that’s a pretty solid setup going into a spooky month of gaming. If you’ve been waiting to pile-drive a Dracula clone, your day has arrived.

 

Graphics: 7.0 The updated graphics are sometimes a little too cartoonish, but they pop on the big screen and help give a lot of extra details to both enemies and death sequences. Filters do a poor job of simulating the original look: it would have been better to simply allow a toggle between the two looks.	Gameplay: 5.0 Dirt simple brawler that still takes some getting used to. Hit boxes are unreliable and enemy strike areas are case by case. AI sometimes glitches out and foes are sitting ducks. Boss patterns are too easy on lower difficulty levels. Minigames are almost tasteless but very funny given the context.
Sound: 8.5 Keeping the tunes upbeat and dynamic instead of leaning into spooky sounds was the right choice, especially given how quickly you can burn through levels. Music is a bop, I would love to walk around, punching barrels to this soundtrack in real life.	Fun Factor: 8.0 The story is dumb as hell, the characters are inexplicably brought together and nothing makes sense, but who cares: I’m punching the crap out of zombies. It’s a great pick up and hit things game when you’ve got a few minutes and Forever Entertainment made sure to allow it to be in bite-sized pieces when you need it.
Final Verdict: 7.0

Night Slashers: Remake is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Night Slashers: Remake was provided by the publisher.