Game Reviews

It's hard to determine exactly what genre Samurai Warriors: Katana falls into. Based on the screenshots, you might be inclined to answer, "What is a light-gun game?" or "What is a first-person shooter?" But that wouldn't quite sway the judges. "What is an on-rails hack-n-slash?" however, might just be accepted. Sure, developer Koei's long-running battle-through-hordes-of-enemies franchise receives a fresh new look (through a first-person perspective), but unfortunately the mind-numbing gameplay remains the same.

Nearly every stage in Katana adheres to the same dull overarching objective: Defeat wave after wave of brain-dead, cookie-cutter henchmen. Throughout the first few stages, instead of merely mashing down on a single button -- the notorious series gimmick -- prepare to get a hefty forearm workout by jostling the Wii Remote to and fro in order to swing your sword. Motion controls aren't necessarily grounds to raise a red flag, though, so long as the control scheme works. Ironically, however, the titular katana controls lack polish. The slow response rate will have you flailing your arm like a jockey trying to beat a dead horse, and without a proper one-to-one response rate (where individual arm actions are mimed likewise onscreen), the sword mechanics rely on several air swipes before you're chomping through enemies. In fact, you could just as easily play the first few stages by duct-taping the Wii-mote to an oscillating fan. There's really no strategy involved. After hacking your way through those initial stages -- and when you finally gain the ability to pick up new weapons -- Katana becomes mildly entertaining. The spear, for example, makes combat less of a burden simply because it relies on old-fashioned button pressing. Enemies are much easier to thwart when aiming your cursor and stabbing endlessly with the A button. Scoring combos with both the spear and a projectile weapon equipped -- choices include a gun, a bow and arrows, and even a canon (all of which are acquired later in the game) -- also provides some of the few pleasures in Katana. Stabbing enemies up close and then taking aim at distant baddies on horseback feels satisfyingly sadistic. The shooting mechanic is by far the best feature in Katana; it's too bad so few stages incorporate it.