Cartoon Network's Samurai Jack is a dark, sparse show focused on a lone warrior out for revenge. Macrospace's Samurai Jack: Samurai Showdown captures the show's isolated, stylized beauty, but ultimately misses the mark due to shallow gameplay.
Like a '90s arcade brawler, your samurai moves left to right slashing and shooting enemies while jumping onto ledges and over deadly rivers. The controls are basic: The 5 key stabs, 1 and 3 jump left/right, 7 fires arrows, and 9 activates a "smart bomb." The game is pretty responsive, especially considering the amount of action happening onscreen.
And there's always a lot of action happening at any given time. Initially, our hero is attacked by two enemies at a time, but a few rounds into the game there are a minimum of four assassins all vying for his head.
The graphics, like the TV show, are crisp and stark. Macrospace creates a great sense of depth with the isometric camera angle and parallax scrolling. The characters are well defined, but small, allowing more action onscreen as well as extra room to plan maneuvers and attacks. Multiple-hit attacks are encouraged by a combo meter and bonuses that double the score for simultaneous deaths.
Unfortunately, Macrospace limited the variety in both level structure and samurai moves. The relatively lengthy areas, sans an occasional bonus round or boss battle, play identically to one another. Also, there are only a couple of types of enemies with little variance from round to round, other than the increasing number of bad guys.
Samurai Jack: Samurai Showdown's most glaring weakness is its lack of a block button. This omission not only makes the character's moves too limited, it makes the game less fair. There's nothing more frustrating than fighting three uber-skilled blue samurai and a flying monster and not having any way to block their attacks. Historically, I think samurai probably knew how to block.
That said, Samurai Jack: Samurai Showdown did provide an hour or so of mindless action. It's too bad that Macrospace didn't tweak the gameplay a bit, because with a little more attention this game could have been really killer.
