For this week’s “MacStories Weekly Game”, I needed a good ol’ action game to talk about. You know those hack & slash type of games, where you usually wander around levels focusing on killing enemies and making combos? I grew up with them. Then God of War came around and the new kids got a new concept of hack & slash. But Samurai II is different: while clearly inspired by the post-God of War generation (the level schemes, the rich graphics, the bosses, the upgrades, the roll), it retains a somewhat old-style feeling that I was missing on the iPhone.
Samurai II: Vengeance is the sequel to last year’s Samurai: War of the Warrior, featured by Apple in the Best Games of 2009. It was indeed a great game, packed with stylish manga-like graphics, swipe-based controls and good action. Quite possibly, the original Samurai for iPhone is still one of the best action games out there. With Samurai II, though, the developers enhanced the whole system, create even better graphics and took away a few things.
The swipe controls are gone. Instead, you have to control the main character (Daisuke, a samurai on a quest to save his country from war - whatever, action matters here) using a virtual joystick on screen. Ok, calm down: I know virtual joysticks usually suck at precision controls and are way too obtrusive, but this one’s pretty decent. First, it’s a transparent overlay with elegant buttons. Your eyes won’t really notice it. Second, it’s got one only “stick” on the left to move the samurai and three other smaller buttons on the right to perform a heavy attack, a light attack and a roll to avoid enemies. More God of War influence, huh? As you can guess, combining light and heavy attacks creates combos - and you’ll have a few seconds to chain an attack to another one to keep on combo’ing. You can unlock more combos by collecting “karma points” and buying new moves in the “shop”. To get karma points, you have to kill enemies and destroy elements on screen. It all comes down to action.
So about the controls: they’re good, but I miss the innovative cool factor of swipe sometimes. I guess the developers wanted a more classic approach for the sequel, and it’s ok. It’s just too bad that you can’t adjust the dimensions of the buttons on screen - sometime you’ll end up performing the wrong attack or rolling instead of killing a dying enemy. Especially on the iPad, it would have made sense to provide this option. You can, however, adjust the position of the controls. Yeah, the app is universal and runs just fine on iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch 3G, and iPad. the iPad version is just a bigger one, but boy those graphics look shiny on its screen.
About sound effect and graphics: the game is impressive. It feels like being inside this chapter of Vagabond by Inoue and killing, killing, killing with your character which is a 3D model running around on a cleverly designed manga environment. You have to see it, it’s got a great feeling to it. Also: gotta love the blood on the screen. You’ll see.
As far as the gameplay goes, you basically run through these levels killing enemies (soldiers working for a demon known as Orochi), mid-level bosses and bosses. If you like H&S games, you know what you’re gonna find here. Sure there are puzzles to solve and traps to avoid, but action is what really matters. It can get borring pretty quickly for some, but I enjoyed the game. I guess you really have to like the genre, and I do.
At $2.99 in the App Store with great graphics and old style gameplay, Samurai II is highly recommended. Go get it and enjoy it for the weekend, folks.
