Night Slashers is the first game I spent significant time with on my Switch in a while. I’m not sure why I hadn’t been feeling Nintendo’s little hybrid this year, but despite having some anticipation for Kirby and mild interest in Mario Strikers I just haven’t wasn’t playing it. But I have been on an inexplicable beat ‘em up kick lately and the idea of playing Night Slashers appealed to me just because it’s something different in the genre. There have quietly been a lot of ports of previously unavailable arcade games to the PS4 and Switch over the last five years, and Night Slashers is a game I picked up in 2018 and hadn’t really played much of. I sat down and finished it today and it is in some ways the quintessential arcade beat ‘em up. A game with no depth, not a ton of replay value, but enough flashy gore and cool theming to pull in a few quarters in 1993.

Night Slashers’ gameplay will be familiar to anyone who visited an arcade in the early 90s or who has dipped back into that era of video games. It’s a classic beat ‘em up with big sprites on a 2D background moving left, right, up, and down, and punching enemies in the face. The easiest comparison for Night Stalkers is probably to the Final Fight series, but there are literally dozens of games that adhere to this formula, though their popularity has waned significantly despite a recent mini-revival with games like Streets of Rage 4, Final Vendetta, and a number of indies.

So is Night Stalkers a great one of these? No. As I’ve said I’ve played a bunch of beat ‘em ups recently including spending some time with true classics like Streets of Rage and Final Fight and Night Stalkers can’t match those games in smoothness or pacing. Night Stalkers feels stiff, and has a somewhat limited move set. There are 3 selectable characters; a big slow guy with cybernetic arms, a fast lady, and a medium speed martial arts guy. They can all punch out a basic combo, jump, grab enemies by walking into them and then throw them, and unleash a screen blasting special move at the cost of some health. There is food to pick up that restores a depressingly small amount of health and a few weapons like knives that you can throw at enemies but cannot, as far as I can tell, hold on to like the pipes in Final Fight. The lack of long term weapons really reduces the game’s variety, though it tries to mix things up a tiny bit with a couple sections where your characters run and you fight pursuers, and two interstitial bonus games that are mildly amusing. It's not a bad game for the time but there's just not much to it and it gets repetitive and a little boring like most average beat 'em ups do.

The game looks great, with enemies consisting of rotting zombies and evil werewolves who all explode in showers of gore when killed. The first few stage backgrounds are really entertaining, full of dilapidated hospital wards, fog filled forests, and dark castles, but later levels unfortunately take you to more conventional locations like a cargo plane and a high tech lab. It’s not that these areas are awful, they’re just boring and in a game that’s almost entirely driven by its charm it’s a serious let down. It’s pretty fun to be able to use a wrestling DDT on the Grim Reaper but it’s less fun when you ae doing it in a freight elevator instead of some spooky temple or some trippy extra-dimensional location or hell itself (which you unfortunately never get to visit.) The music is pretty repetitive and the game hides its mechanical simplicity by being relatively short even for a beat ‘em up. It’s the kind of game that works well in an arcade where it can pull people in and get them to spend a few quarters for shock value alone, much like its predecessor Splatterhouse and, of course, its contemporary Mortal Kombat.

Unlike Splatterhouse, however, which had home ports and even home exclusive sequels, Night Slashers never got a home console port around the time of its release. It was made by Data East, which produced plenty of home ports of its arcade titles, so it’s not a matter of the game being made by an arcade only company or having rights issues. Instead I think it’s a matter of the era when it was made and the nature of the game itself.

Night Slashers came out in 1993, right as Virtua Fighter was ushering in the age of polygon graphics in the arcade. It was also a time when the beat ‘em up genre was already on the wane, especially on home consoles. In the back half of the 16-bit console period games were getting more complex and deeper while Night Slashers stayed stubbornly shallow and unevolved. If it had come home on Genesis or SNES it would have had to compromise the only thing it had going for it, its aesthetics, and by the time PlayStation and Saturn came around consumers just were not interested in these kinds of bare bones arcade conversions. While Nekketsu Oyako (Hot-Blooded Family) did come out as a launch game for the PlayStation in Japan it was never ported for the West, and the few beat ‘em ups that are remembered from the 32-bit era tended to have a lot more going on than something like Night Slashers, which didn’t have the depth or complexity of Guardian Heroes or the D&D collection on Saturn.

So Night Slashers faded away into obscurity (not that it was ever a huge hit) and was mostly forgotten outside a few Youtube retrospectives until it got this Switch release. It’s a decent port despite being released under the truly awful Johnny Turbo’s Arcade branding (the games themselves range from mediocre to quite good and the emulation and options are fine but the line’s branding just seems cheap and very cheesy). The ironic thing about Night Slashers is that despite being too old-fashioned for a port upon release it has aged surprisingly well. It was never about the gameplay and the art and aesthetics are still fun all these years later. It’s just the kind of game you play through once or twice and then maybe boot up on Halloween from time to time but don’t invest the kind of time in that would justify the amount that games used to cost. Now that it can be had as a download for under $10 it’s worth it. I really enjoy seeing games like this surface on modern systems. They scratch a very particular itch and while indies are trying to innovate in the genre and create new versions of the top tier games there isn’t anybody making new versions of this kind of schlock because if you’re going to invest in a new game why not try to make it actually good? Night Slashers isn’t really good but it’s a good time. I hope companies continue to re-release this kind of back catalog title so we can get official releases of not just the super popular classics we all remember but also the weird little experiments that made gaming in the 80s and 90s so interesting and fun.

Nothing captures the spirit of the mid 90's localization like taking an object from a foreign country and calling it something completely different like pizza or hamburgers. :P

Good read! Cool looking game, I like good beat em ups from that era and never heard of this one.

Yes, a fun read! I find I sometimes enjoy beat 'em ups in theory/at a distance/aesthetically - in practice they might prove a bit too repetetive and mechanically simple. Though I can certainly appreciate werewolves disintegrating into bloody piles of fur and flesh.

But I have enjoyed some classics and newer ones - recently had a pretty great time with Shredder's Revenge! It does help that they're usually short enough that you don't have time to loose interest.