Even the painfully easy levels are maddening, sometimes requiring you to trek through the same sewers and city streets across several missions so you can activate the next scripted attack. This usually involves fighting through crowds of lurching zombies or (more commonly) rushing past them until a fence appears and forces you to mash mash mash until you beat all the enemies or a key appears. Then you go unlock a new area and do it all again. This wouldn't be so bad if there were some eye candy to gaze at, but even the titular samurai squad members aren't much to look at. They animate stiffly and their robotic gyrations look so uncomfortable it's a wonder the gals haven't needed hip surgery. Their prerendered counterparts in cutscenes look more lifelike, but the cinematics are ugly and suffer from hideous screen tearing. Everything is a painfully low resolution, which makes it hard to stomach the frequent loading times. At least Onechanbara throws you a bone here, letting you play a little zombie-killing minigame during loading screens that exudes more charm than the actual campaign.
Bang.
Perhaps you are a glutton for punishment, and if so, you'll be glad to know that Onechanbara offers a fair amount of replay value. A so-called quest system will have you gunning to meet certain gameplay requirements, like killing a certain number of zombies. You can fight endless gangs of the undead in survival mode and unlock new costumes and accessories so you can view your seductresses in various forms of undress. You'll also be leveling them up and spending points on attributes like vitality and speed, which helps out if you want to explore the harder difficulty levels that you can unlock. Or if you prefer suffering with a friend, you can take on the zombie apocalypse in split-screen cooperative play, which makes the game a bit more enjoyable because you have someone to make fun of it with, but causes the frame rate to take a bit of a hit. As for the annoyingly repetitive sound effects and ear-splitting soundtrack, the less said about them the better.
For those who like the imagery but came for the story (are there such folks?), you'll find one buried in here, but it's hard to care about the walls of badly translated text and misspelled dialogue that convey it. So what reason is there to play Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad? There is none, so suppress any morbid interest you may harbor and spend your money elsewhere, because neither acrobatic temptresses nor legions of the lurching undead can make this game worth playing.
Where to buy
Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad (Xbox 360):
$29.99 - $39.99
| store | price | in stock? | rating |
|---|---|---|---|
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$38.99 | No |
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RadioShack.com
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$39.99 | Yes |
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$29.99 | Yes |
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