After the release of the cult-classic manga publication, as well as the subsequent anime mini-series, Afro Samurai has made the transition to the world of interactive entertainment in the form of a fully-fledged, Namco-produced videogame, bringing with it the stylised look, voice talent (such as Samuel L. Jackson and Kelly Hu) and original music (from Wu-Tang Clan member, RZA) that gave the anime mini-series such a cult following. What could go wrong, right?

Well, for a licensed game, Afro Samurai certainly is a high quality third-person action adventure slash ‘em up, with a graphical style that is definitely appealing, a fusion of western, hip hop and oriental inspired background music, great voice acting and highly satisfying combat, all coming together to create a game that capitalises on the source material.

For a game trying to compete in a world of triple-A titles, however, Afro Samurai soon degenerates into a stop-start action affair, as the presentation begins to fall away, the combat shows itself up to be shallow and linear, and the story skips from plot point to plot point without regard for those of us that have never seen the source material.

The back-story for Afro Samurai is fairly comprehensible – you as Afro, a rogue, sword-wielding samurai assassin, are tasked with avenging the death of your father by the hand of a master swordsman, who happens to be in the possession of a legendary, ceremonial artefact called the Number One Headband, a relic that is said to grant the owner the power to rule the world. The only problem is that, in order to challenge the wearer of the Number One Headband and thus attempt to destroy him, the challenger must be in the possession of the Number Two Headband.

The story itself sees Afro, accompanied by a ninja guide (of sorts), fighting off countless enemy ninjas, powerful samurai and robotic ninja clones in order to achieve what he sets off to do, while being engulfed in a story that may appear epic, intelligent and profound, but fails to deliver due to the poor handling of the tale, told through brief cut scenes and during load sequences, with no explanation or story links in-between, leaving the player no more clued into the intricacies of the narrative than when they began.

While it is possible to trace through the progression and series of events in the game with the information provided, the entire adventure simply doesn’t make sense, at least to someone who has never read the manga or seen the mini-series, which means most players of Afro Samurai will have little to no context for the gallons of spilled blood and tons of severed limbs that ensue.

This leaves players with the combat to enjoy, simply for the sake of enjoying it, which is fine for the first hour or so of playing the game, providing excellently satisfying sword fights enforced by the great visual feedback of effortlessly chopping enemies in half, and visceral sound effects that accompany the mayhem. Taking advantage of a series of kicks, jumps and horizontal and vertical slashes, as well as combinations of those actions, you’re able to separate ninjas from their extremities with ease.

Making the action a little more satisfying is the addition of a bullet-time (sword-time?) effect, allowing you to slow down time for short periods in order to better aim your strikes and enable one-hit kills. In any given encounter, facing off against a handful of goons trying to cut you down, you can simply juggle between them by slashing one, darting to another enemy with a flurry of kicks, move on to another fool and slow down time to slice him down the centre, before finishing off the previous two enemies with a sweep kick and, while they float helplessly in your time trap, you carve them to pieces with a well-timed side-slash, as masses of blood spurt every which way.

It is gratifying, to be sure, but only until the action and encounters deteriorate into room after room and area after area of kill boxes (sectioned off areas where the only way out is to kill everybody in sight), and the combat abilities themselves are revealed to be extremely shallow. There exists the opportunity to use different combinations of moves, but none of them are necessary to progress and hardly necessitate the need to learn the required series of button inputs, when the usual range of attacks are just as effective.

Requiring players to use different attacks and strategies in different situations would have mixed up the combat quite nicely, but currently, the only reason to learn the combos would be to mix up the action for yourself when you get bored of the normal attacks, which is a state that no developer should allow a player to fall into. There is a levelling system in which you rank up your character’s statistics, allowing you access to more attacks and to become more powerful, but this, too, is pretty linear and almost unnecessary.

Exacerbating the feeling of linear combat is the linear series of levels that do their best to seem open-ended, but only end up confusing the issue of where to go, as there is only ever one ‘correct’ exit and entrance per area anyway. You end up having to use your ninja guide (who pops up at the press of a button) to show you the way, but it might have been a bit more intuitive using traditional visual level progression hints and tricks, rather than allowing the player to be confused for even a second, and then falling back on a crutch.

Traversing the environments is made a little easier with the ability to do some wall running (either horizontally and over a short gap in the path, or vertically up a short incline), but the fact that you can only use this ability in specific instances (i.e. when the game requires you to use them in order to progress further) again reveals your limited (and linear) set of available actions,

What is interesting in Afro Samurai is the lack of any heads up display (HUD), as all of the necessary information is related to the player through visuals and audio – Afro’s deteriorating health, for example, is shown through an increasingly intensive layer of blood on his clothes, with sound distortion and thumping heart-beats further relaying information about your diminished physical condition. The end result is very effective, which means you always know whether you’re in danger of an imminent death or not.

The great attempt at a HUD-less appearance, though, is countered by the increasingly lazy attempts at presentation, as evidenced by the bobbing heads to denote speech (rather than moving lips), stilted level transitions, the stop-start nature of the action, and the repetitious fight scenes. Effort dedicated to tutorials, too, goes missing, as information about how to perform certain moves is provided in one or two bubbles of text.

This is especially bad when the game is trying to teach you how to perform special case actions (that are usable later) that you have to carry out in order to progress, which leads to encounters during the game that would have easily taken under two minutes to complete, but are instead drawn out because the information given is so sparse. It all just points to a rushed development schedule that didn’t leave time for an extra layer of care that other triple-A games enjoy, which is the main differentiator between Afro Samurai and a game of greater quality.

Afro Samurai (the game) appears to be a victim of a rushed, lazy or poorly planned out development schedule, or perhaps a combination of all three. While the developers clearly achieved an exceptional level of visual and aural quality, with a few interesting ideas and mechanics injected into the mix, there apparently wasn’t enough time to do anything clever with what they had, never proceeding past the ability to provide a satisfying amount of feedback for actions during combat.

With a nonsensical story and half-hearted attempts at dramatic (and instructional) presentation, Afro Samurai is a game that would have benefited from a few months of intensive polishing, but was unfortunately not granted any more time than was deemed necessary for a licensed title - even one with such a cult following behind the source material.

Pros: Graphically appealing style; good music and voice acting; satisfying combat feedback; nice attempt at a HUD-less experience

Cons: Shallow combat system; deteriorating presentation; nonsensical story; adult language and content can get a bit much – seems unnecessary; iffy collision system

Purchase: