Purchased for 60 cents, samurai_jazz proves itself not unworthy of the price: interesting combat considerations and a pleasant visual style make for a good early impression and present plenty of potential for a fun beat-em-up, but weak puzzles and underdeveloped enemies mean things soon turn tired and tedious after the halfway point.
Not an unpleasant experience, in fact, one I'd rather enjoy seeing further fleshed out, but in its current, far-from-perfect form and approximately hour playlength, I'd be hard pressed to recommend it over a 100-in-1 cartridge of NES classics.
NES-era games traditionally boil down to using simple controls to navigate increasingly difficult enemy encounters spread out across fairly memorable, or at least aesthetically varied, levels, often climaxing with some sorta pattern-based boss battle. Megaman, Double Dragon, Guevera, Contra, and Metroid all, for example, roughly follow this formula. samurai_jazz, meanwhile, misses the point somewhat.
Its controls are comfortably simple: move, attack, interact, and stance. Stance locks the player to a direction and slows movement, but allows for autoblocking and dashing; attacking and interacting work as you'd expect. Enemy behavior, unfortunately, fails to fully utilize this moveset, its complexity slowly growing before quickly tapering off, surmounting to a nice combination of projectile and lanky enemies that force a satisfying string of attack, dash, attack, etc. Sadly, challenging enemy combinations like this are introduced rather late into the game, and similar concepts aren't explored beyond that example. Compare this to say, Contra or Megaman, where enemies are introduced in a screen or two, then quickly doubled/tripled up on and later combined with previous enemies, filling their respective weaknesses and instilling certain, potentially exploitable behavior/expectations in the player. samurai_jazz' difficulty curve seems to derive mostly from sheer enemy numbers and the navigational challenges inherent to such encounters, not necessarily a terrible approach to progression, but one that is much better served in conjunction with combined enemy types. I would much rather have seen variances in enemy speed, movement patterns, attack properties, etc working with other variances of enemy speed, moevement patters, etc. This could have been used to, not only improve the satisfaction of the numerous enemy encounters, but also build up to interesting boss fights, as opposed to the impressively bland, conclusionary fight.
While old-school classics such as Prince of Persia and Another World were able to get away with trial-and-error, spike abundant puzzles, due in part to their slower pace and general age, samurai_jazz is a modern, albeit retro-styled, game, and therefore its gameplay loop should reflect the nearly thirty years since those titles released. Brute forcing puzzles through repeated deaths should be a last resort, not the modus operandi, especially in an action-oriented brawler. Roughly halfway thru samurai_jazz, what were previously quirky fetch quests to stimulate more combat, a pleasantry in beat-em-ups, quickly turn into a respawn heavy hunt for patterns, and that's about as far from the previously entertaining combat and charming dialogue as one could get. Puzzles should either be intuitively obvious to frame further action or evironmentally subtle, requiring critical thinking and cleverness: dialogue cues, past observations, referenceable knowledge, etc.
Repeated room exploration bringing up to the minor annoyance of room transitioning not requiring a press of the interact button, so one can very easily dodge out of the current room by accident, resetting the enemies and generally proving little more than a troublesome occurance.
All in all, samurai_jazz isn't a bad game: it looks and sounds nice, and combat is fun, plus with its dollar price tag, its less than perfect execution clearly isn't that big of deal comparatively, but given how little it currently brings to the table compared to similar classics, the majority of which are availible for a comparable price, its recommendation is hard to swing. You just don't gain that much from playing it.
