Vital Stats

Genre: Brawler
Players: 1-2.
Online: XBL Co-op

Developer: SKA Software
Publisher: Microsoft
ESRB Rating: M
Release Date: 4/1/09

Platforms

• XBLA

When 2D gaming was king, the streets ran red with brawlers. You couldn’t swing a sharp stick without hitting a musclebound high-schooler out to save his kidnapped girlfriend from local gangs of unreasonably skilled martial artists. Then 2D gaming went dormant, and notable brawlers all but ceased to be, with only God of War to mark their passing. Now that the rise of casual gamers has emphasized portable systems and downloadable content, tiny games are big again, and brawlers like The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai have returned to wreak their bloody vengeance on our thumbs. Despite the superficial similarities to erstwhile brawlers, The Dishwasher inherits more from God of War than Double Dragon, and is all the better for it.

Brawling Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
The Dishwasher is a stylish brawler, so long as stylish means very, very bloody. You take control of a revenge-fueled zombie as he cuts through cultist cyborgs using little more than button-chain combos, quick time events, and sharp objects. When a simple action game asks you to memorize long strings of button presses, it usually feels like the developer has assigned you homework, and the better you score, the more fun you get to have. Fortunately, The Dishwasher eliminates most of that kludge because the combo chains are streamlined so much that they’re indistinguishable from button mashing. In fact, so long as you remember to alternate between the weak and strong attack buttons from time to time, you can infer most of the game’s combos without ever seeing the menu that explains them.

Diplomacy has failed!

Button mashing won’t get you past the easiest difficulty level, though. Dedicated gamers will find that mastery of the game’s many combos will let the dishwasher juggle foes, exercise controlled knockback, and make tactical use of rolling dodges, all of which are required as the game becomes more difficult. Multiply that across five selectable weapons that vary in speed and strength, and there’s a great deal of depth to be had from picking the right combo and weapon for the situation at hand.

Climbing difficulty levels comprise more than simple damage scaling. Enemies that only appear as bosses in easy mode are sprinkled throughout higher difficulty levels, usually appearing with a swarm of distracting enemies. Even the most minimally threatening cyborg zombies can drop a stationary dishwasher in seconds, so you can imagine how harrowing a battle with 5 enemies and two bosses can be (and how exhilarating winning is). As tough as these fights are, they greatly increase the game’s replayability, because changing the difficulty means changing the game.

For all the game’s remorseless sadism, it’s remarkably accessible. Weapons unlock as you progress through story mode, and each weapon can be upgraded by spending the money you filch from cooling corpses. Upgrades unlock new combos, so the game doles out weapons and combos incrementally, which gives you a chance to pick up one set of combos before moving on to the next. If your growing arsenal isn’t enough to help you win, you can buy recovery items at the upgrade stores. There’s even a magic system that offers a dose of screen clearing murder that can be recharged whenever you successfully execute a quick time event.

The ultimate poultice for your wounds is multiplayer, though. A second player can take control of your shadow at the press of a button, adding another dishwasher to the carnage. The game’s difficulty doesn’t scale with an extra player, so multiplayer effectively doubles your damage output while spreading out the incoming pain. Allies aren’t purely beneficial, however, because a second dishwasher doubles the action on an already hectic screen. Between the blood and particle effects, you’ll be lucky to know where you are, let alone whether you’re in trouble. The camera won’t zoom out either, so you and your friend can find yourselves offscreen and fighting blind from moment to moment.

Black and White and Red All Over

Like playing Where’s Waldo in a gunfight.

The onscreen havoc isn’t solely responsible for the trouble you’ll have seeing, though. Part of the problem is that The Dishwasher is largely painted in blacks and grays. Your character, being mostly white and black, blends into scenery when pitted against the bright blood and colorful sparks flying everywhere. The color scheme fits with the negative utopia themes that crop up around soulless cyborgs, but when it doesn’t interfere with the gameplay, there’s not much to see.

The story is delivered through brief comic strips that break up the action. The art suffers during the extreme close-ups that fill most of these strips (imagine a talented 5th grader trying to draw a malicious smile with a sharpie). There are places where the style works and gives the game an edgy indie feel, but some of the panels are outright inscrutable, and the whole feels more lazy than handcrafted. It doesn’t help that the narrative reads like every other samurai story from the loner with nothing to lose to his mysterious benefactor. Not even cyborgs and gouts of blood can mitigate the narrative sameness, though fans of the samurai motif may be willing to overlook it. Thankfully, the story interludes are both brief and skippable, so they don’t really harm the game.

The time SKA saved on the art definitely went into the music, though. The ambient music in most levels sounds like it was played on a koto, and it fits the samurai themes well. However, when exploration breaks into combat, the score transitions a few hundred years and focuses instead on the electric guitar. The interplay between the feudal Japanese and modern strings makes for an interesting sound you don’t often hear in games. The music impinges on the gameplay as well, with a handful of rhythm minigames, and an alternate multiplayer mode where the second player can use a guitar controller to put some death metal into the cyborgs.

Last Words
All in all, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is a fine brawler. It feels remarkably similar to God of War, albeit in 2D, and shares many mechanics and the over-the-top violence. Casual gamers won’t likely have much use for owning the game, though it’s fun to pick up the dishwasher’s shadow for a few minutes of bloodletting. Genre fans and hardcore players should appreciate the depth and replayabiity, with the experience undiminished by the story. Give it a shot if you’re in the mood for some unrepentant action.

What It Costs: $10

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $15 (buy)
•To The Genre Fan: $15 (buy)
•To The Casual: $0 (play)