“Sweet merciful Lord!”. That’s what I said when I stumbled across this game at J&R Electronics yesterday. I’d seen the screenshots and movies from E3 and was itching to get this game… so you can imagine my surprise when it was actually on the shelves. So, I quickly snatched it up and ran to the counter,
credit card in hand, and I headed home to play this beautiful game.
I usually wait for my son to go to sleep before I play a console game, but this time I just couldn’t wait anymore. I mean, it’s Way of the Freakin’ Samurai! So, I popped it in and started it up. I started working through the tutorial, and my wife walked by and said “Is that your new game?”. I got a
little peeved, because it sounded more like “Did you just spend $45 on THAT?!’, but I let it slide and kept on playing. I should have stopped right there and then.
The tutorial was laborious and slow-moving. You can’t skip forward through the comic book-like dialogue, which got more and more annoying as the tutorial progressed. But, I kept telling myself that the tutorial must have been written by a bunch of moronic monkeys on valium, and that the actual game would be much, much better. If only.
I played about an hour’s worth of the game, only to die about 132 times on the ‘Easy’ level. My little samurai guy was unresponsive for almost the entire time, and when he did decide to do what I asked him to, the camera would swoosh around and zoom in on the small of his back or something stupid like that. It certainly wasn’t trying to do something useful, like show the guys I was fighting.
The gameplay was terrible. It’s incredibly simple, but that was part of the appeal. Bushido Blade (one of my all time favorite games) had really simple gameplay, but it’s beauty lay in this simplicity. Way of the Samurai’s beauty lies in the off button.
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