I mostly hate the beat ’em up genre. Double Dragon, Dynasty Warriors and its spinoffs, and their ilk bore me, so when The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai came out on Xbox Live Arcade, I downloaded it expecting the worst. What I got instead was an amazing example of how these kinds of games can be done right at a good price point, and show off a lot of ’indy publisher’ charm. Despite having ’dishwasher’ in its name, this game is an incredibly violent side-scrolling brawler; think “Metal Slug and Contra meet Devil May Cry and Dynasty Warriors.”

GDN Quick & Dirty Review

Dead Samurai combines the best elements of Devil May Cry and Dynasty Warriors with the side-scrolling platform action you’d find in Contra or Metal Slug. It has great controls and offers enough content to justify its price tag. While it has minor problems, this is definitely worth its $10 price.

You control an undead dishwasher on his vaguely explained quest to avenge himself and his sister, but this is mostly an excuse to set you loose on a horde of zombies, ’men in black’, special-operations soldiers, killer robots, and whatever else developer James Silva felt like throwing at you. While you get a few long range attacks, the real focus is the game’s high-speed brawling. You’re rewarded for coming up with long combos to kill your enemies, and the controls are amazing. Response is instantaneous, and you almost always do exactly what you meant to. While a few parts of it aren’t very well documented, for the most part the controls are intuitive and do a great job of keeping you dashing from enemy to enemy, evading fire before launching your victim for an air-combo, ending in a brutal but hilarious finishing move.

As you might expect, beating up hordes of generic enemies before taking on a boss is pretty much the main course here. But you get plenty of variety on how you do that, since you get new toys every few stages. Sometimes it’s a new form of screen-clearing magical attack, but in other cases you gain a new regular weapon and this is where Dead Samurai really shines. Each weapon has its own advantages and problems, the guns are a great example; they’re useless when fired in a ’stand and deliver’ method, but fancy footwork will make your character look like the star of a John Woo pistol opera (an inspiration James Silva seems to readily admit to, as the move-list contains references to Woo’s films) and do quite well. The chainsaw is slow but extremely powerful, the Shift Sword is weak but allows you to teleport around at will, and the kama and cleavers are suited to making long combos. Each has their own use, and this keeps things fun.