Review #489: Samurai Western

  Don't bring a sword to a gunfight.... unless you're a Samurai.

Character design and art-direction gets an A+.

 Have you ever wondered who'd win in a fight between a Cowboy and a Samurai? Acquire set out to answer that question, and them being Japanese won't give them any bias towards the winner... or not. Often called a Way of the Samurai spin-off, Samurai Western is a very different game that was clearly made on a tight budget.

 You play as Gojiro, a Samurai in search of his missing brother, albeit on a mission of revenge. His tracks lead Gojiro to the wild, wild west where he'll have to duke it out with gunmen and outlaws and his missing brother, who has forsaken the way of the sword in exchange for a couple of six-shooters. The story is very cheesy, characters are ridiculous and the situations are very over the top. I loved it. Cutscenes preface and give closure to each stage and they are fairly interesting to watch... as ugly as the graphics are.

It looks really cool... most of the time.

 The game is divided into 16 stages, with 5 bonus unlockable stages for a total of 21. Be forewarned, the game is very short. Your first playthrough will take about 3 hours, if you don't skip cutscenes, but as I replayed the game on Hard, skipping cutscenes, I realized how quickly I was plowing through the game. There's a lot of replayability thanks to the many unlockables, a Survival Mode as well as a Hard difficulty setting... that lets you unlock other characters(They play just as Gojiro, but it's still a nice bonus), not to mention the dozens upon dozens of different accessories you can find to customize Gojiro(Or the other characters) as well as different swords. Oh, and there's co-op, albeit with some limitations, the camera follows player 1, the second player must play as Ralph the cowboy and Ralph fights with a gun, which is admittedly lamer than Gojiro's combo-based gameplay.

 Alright, so how does the game play? Square is your attack button, X jumps and circle can be used to either dodge or deflect bullets. Your square attacks can also reflect bullets if you time it right. You can also grab boxes and other small objects and throw them around, but it's pretty ineffective. Landing blows increases a 'master' gauge beneath your life bar, which is used to enter Master mode by pressing L1, which lasts for as long as you have energy on this gauge, depending on your weapon you'll gain different perks and bonuses. But you can also wait for it to fill completely, in which case you can enter Ultimate Master Mode, which makes you invulnerable and grants you one-hit kills on common enemies. There's also a bizarre first person camera by tapping R2 which is... it's something else, but I guess it can lend itself to a few laughs.

Get ready to fend off hordes of identical looking gunmen.

 Swords you earn give Gojiro different stances, like one-handed letting you double jump, or double swords in which case you lose the ability to grab stuff. Honestly, it's mostly minutiae, but at least they put some work in. Playing the game you'll be able to level up your equipped accessories and your equipped blade, which is a good thing since it will give you better stat bonuses. Gojiro himself levels up as you finish stages and you can allocate bonus stat points in either extending your Health, extending your Master gauge, increasing your damage or defense. The accessory system is pretty neat since you can relocate, rotate or change the size of every accessory you equip.

 Sadly the game is simple to a fault. You'll be doing little more than mashing square button as you defeat the same enemies over and over and over again. Even stages are reused, sometimes changing the time of the day. Sometimes. Bosses have very memorable appearances and personalities, but as far as the fights go... they are pretty lame, and Raddo, Gojiro's brother, is a pain in the butt to fight, clearly they should've designed his fight better than to have the player perform 1-2 slashes in fear of getting counter-attacked. The game itself also feels rough around the edges, like the terrible dodging animation or how poor collision detection works with stairs, don't be surprised if you go through them back to the floor, happened to me twice.

The way of the sword is a deadly one.

 Samurai Western has a lot of soul, but the small budget really hurt it. And you can tell that they tried to make up for what it lacked in substance with extras, like a silly, but functional, two player mode or the copious amount of accessories to put on Gojiro. Samurai Western has more bad things than good things, but the bad is never TOO bad, my time with the game was a fun one but the game needed more work, more variety and a bigger budget.
 6.0 out of 10