If you’re ever feeling bored and just fancy being totally confused and bewildered then you’ve come to the right place. In Killer Is Dead you play as an assassin, Mondo Zappa, who is clearly good at his job judging from the terror in your first victims eyes. That is shortly before he dies, I think, and then teleports to the moon.
Killer is Dead is weird. And I mean really weird. A Short way into the game you go to visit a house that has a very strong Alice in Wonderland theme to it. The atmosphere is something between strange and terrifyingly strange; bolstered all the more by the artistic visuals. The gameplay takes on a simple hack-and-slash mechanic with scripted battle sections slotted in between moving from room to room. Upgrades and new moves for you to acquire tease of a depth that unfortunately never comes to fruition.
Mondo is armed with a katana and a gun-arm, of course. The melee battle mechanics are simple but at times satisfying and good looking. A key element is dodging at the correct time which sees Mondo performing a very powerful counter attack. If done correctly it’s fun, and it looks cool, but it can be frustrating because at times it seems the system isn’t complicated enough to cope with the required button entry.
Unfortunately using Mondo’s blood-powered gun-arm is boring and switches the game into a 3rd person style. Move the cursor and shoot. Something akin to how the guns worked in Assassins Creed III’s combat would have been much better and kept Killer Is Dead in it’s native style. As it happens using Mondo’s gun feels disjointed and disconnected from the rest of the combat.
Between each mission you will get a cutscene that further develops the characters around Mondo. Mondo himself is rather lifeless and there’s very little to become attached to. The supporting characters have some personality but nothing to get excited about. It might have helped if I had the slightest idea what was going on in the plot, but I didn’t. Because of my confusion I really just wanted to get back playing a mission.
When one of our customers walked into the office after a successful assignment we talked for a bit and then he disappeared because he was a ghost. The team all had a good laugh about that. Except me because I didn’t have a clue what was happening. I really felt like I was missing some clever metaphor or concept which only made me all the more detracted from my experience.
On the other hand Killer Is Dead is one of the most striking titles I’ve ever seen. It’s different and refreshing although at times it just looks like someone turned the gamma up way too high. The anime is pretty standard stuff behind whatever effect it is that makes Killer Is Dead so unique but it gets the job done. The only thing visually that gets tired and repetitive are the way females are represented in Killer Is Dead.
Right from the start you will be shamelessly assaulted by innuendo. “Gigolo” missions see you having to flirt with a woman to unlock upgrades. But for some reason this is done by catching glimpses of her chest or “legs” while she looks away. Besides this all female characters in Killer Is Dead follow usual anime traditions. One of them dons a nurses uniform and rides around on a provocatively placed giant floating syringe. Oh dear.
It’s juvenile and before long starts getting embarrassing. It serves only to degrade what I already consider art when a game so strongly focused on being artistic feels the need to rely on suggestive scantily clad anime girls. The upgrades you can acquire from the Gigolo missions don’t feel that important or particularly well integrated either. Luckily the upgrades offer choice and acquiring them usually feels progressive. There’s certainly always something to aim for but it always feels attainable.
Killer Is Dead provides some fun hack-and-slash style action but doesn’t have much depth to go with it. A ludicrous plot and forgettable characters make it very difficult to get truly absorbed into Killer Is Dead’s world. The protagonist aims for suave and debonair but comes off cold and lifeless and the constant barrage of embarrassing soft-core anime only further demotes Killer Is Dead.
However, if you just switch your brain off and play there is some fun to be had. Killer Is Dead certainly looks good and it’s refreshing to play something with a different visual style but beyond its good looks and PS2 style fighting system Killer Is Dead only provides you with an impossible plot and generic characterization. Look through the thin veneer of the high contrast graphics and Killer Is Dead shows its true colours to be a bland muddle of out-dated gaming conventions.
Reviewed on PS3
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