Samurai Wish

Samurai Wish, a game that plays similarly to Hotline Miami but definitely needs more polish. My first impressions were that the gameplay and aesthetic are good, but the game seems to fall short when it comes to the story of the missions, the music, the difficulty of some of the enemies, and various big bugs. As a samurai, you'd usually believe your character's role would be to uphold good values and, in this game, help grant people's wishes using your strength and skill. However this game opens up with the second level having you literally kill a bunch of defenseless teachers in a school just because a kid was mad that his math teacher called him a loser. No joke. Another level is an old lady saying people that go to nightclubs are ruining their futures and she wants you to stop the nightclub, so you just kill everyone inside to grant her wish, because that obviously helps save their futures. And then another level actually has you kill everyone at a movie theather because some weeb is mad about a bad adaptation of their favorite manga. And apparently everyone in the theater has a gun. By the way, those are the first three missions and they all take place in popular places here i…

Hotline Miami: But in Japan

If you liked Hotline Miami, this is totally like it. All the blood, all the fun and even more techniques such as a dash to escape enemies or their bullets....great game!

Incredibly frustrating. The gun-wielding enemies (which become quite numerous in later levels) can turn around on a dime shoot instantly, which becomes awful in tight corners, where you can't just snipe them with shurikens from afar. Just baiting them can lead to instant death, and when they see you, there's not even a microsecond of delay before they shoot you. Deflecting the bullets with your sword can only get you so far, since, for some baffling reason, every time you deflect a bullet, the game puts you on a 5-second cooldown before you can do it again. This means that when you come up against enemies with SMGs, where they shoot multiple bullets per second, it becomes impossible to avoid dying. Also, why bother making an achievement for each level for completing it without dying, when dying just restarts the entire level anyways? There's no challenge there; it just makes it so you have to exit to the main menu, go back to the hub, and restart the mission from there, just so you can reset your deaths. It's just more tedium for each time you die to those instakilling gun enemies, all so you can get those stupid hats. I've had enough of this game, and I'm glad I only paid around…

Samurai Wish is a 2D retro pixel brawler/shooter with a Samurai/crime theme. It's in some ways a ripoff of Hotline Miami, but with katanas and of worse quality, if such a thing is possible. One thing going for this is that it doesn't seem to be a template or an asset flip, it just seems like someone really wanted to make a video game but didn't really know how. Case in point, controls and resolution are locked and can't be changed. They chose to use obsolete retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. On par with these gaping technical flaws, the gameplay itself is incredibly janky and the art assets are very poor quality as well. As you can see from the screenshots, the developer didn't know how to draw a pixel samurai, so you're just a Japanese jingasa hat. Deplorably low quality here in both implementation and presentation makes this impossible to recommend. But at least it's not another asset flip/template flip?

https://youtu.be/ChVys0XcW2k I reviewed this game for my channel. The game is not without its flaws and rough edges. Some might even convince you the game isn't that great. But, persevere with it, and beneath is a game that's a tonne of mindless fun, that promotes skill, playing the game to the boundaries of your own skills while pushing you to get better, and has a very odd, but oddly likeable character to it, at a great price.