Samurai Wish, a game that plays similarly to Hotline Miami but definitely needs more polish.
My first impressions were that the gameplay and aesthetic are good, but the game seems to fall short when it comes to the story of the missions, the music, the difficulty of some of the enemies, and various big bugs.
As a samurai, you'd usually believe your character's role would be to uphold good values and, in this game, help grant people's wishes using your strength and skill. However this game opens up with the second level having you literally kill a bunch of defenseless teachers in a school just because a kid was mad that his math teacher called him a loser. No joke. Another level is an old lady saying people that go to nightclubs are ruining their futures and she wants you to stop the nightclub, so you just kill everyone inside to grant her wish, because that obviously helps save their futures. And then another level actually has you kill everyone at a movie theather because some weeb is mad about a bad adaptation of their favorite manga. And apparently everyone in the theater has a gun. By the way, those are the first three missions and they all take place in popular places here in America where we've had mass shootings. Don't think that was intended, really hope it was just the dev designed the levels and threw in the story later and it was just a coincidence.
Anyways, my point with this is these levels would be fine if the story dialogue at the beginning of them just framed it better. With the school, for example, the dialogue could've been that the school had been taken over by terrorists or a gang or something and a student is wishing to be saved. With just that bit of dialogue before the level, you wouldn't even have to change the level design itself at all. It puts the player in the frame of mind of being a hero, makes your actions justified, and even gives the dev an excuse to add in enemies with guns on the level. Instead, all of those missions make me feel like the bad guy. And don't get me wrong, a game where you're a samurai that just grants people wishes could totally have levels that make you feel like the wish you granted was for someone evil. But when the game opens with three levels that make me feel like I took someone's wish waaaay too far, that kind of throws me out of the experience of being a samurai. There is also a level where a gang member or something is making a wish to help them pull off a crime by disabling some security for a police station. So our character decides to grant their wish by just killing all the cops in the place. Really? It's a bit much.
The music of this game when you're in a level also takes you out of the experience. It's nice music, really chill, but the problem is the fact that it's chill music in a game about being a fast samurai fighting bad guys. Feels really out of place and just ruins a lot of the hype of the combat itself.
Your character's combat moves are nice, but the frustration with this games comes from the gun enemies. Enemies with guns that aim right at you and start firing quick are okay but when it feels like they shoot at you before you can even see them there, the levels end up feeling like you have to memorize it all through a lot of trial and error and spamming attacks. Which would be fine too (to an extent), but then the game also punishes you for your misses. You can deflect their bullets back to them, which is cool, but it almost always ends up with you being killed with them because they shoot so much so quickly that by the time you deflect there's already another bullet coming. And then it gets even worse to deal with when there are levels with a large group of gunmen all together. So you'd think you could use your shuriken on them, but aiming with the controller can be tricky, especially when they start shooting before you can even see them. You can expand your view by pressing down the right stick, but you can't effectively aim and hold the stick down at the same time.
Also, as someone with two monitors, you just can't play this game without a controller. This is because the game doesn't keep your mouse locked onto the game's screen. This means if you have two monitors, you can end up moving your mouse off the game and onto the other screen even though you think you're still aiming in the game and if you click to shoot you end up clicking off the game and everything goes downhill from there.
I also couldn't find an options menu for video settings, such as resolutions or making your game fullscreen or windowed. In fact, you also can't change your options without going to the main menu, which is very annoying.
And there were audio bugs where sometimes going to the main menu would lower the volume of the whole game. So if you kept doing it eventually the whole game went quiet.
Overall, while the combat moves feel good and the premise seems cool, I can't recommend this game unless it gets some more polishing. Rework the mission stories, fix the multiple monitor and audio bugs, give access to change options in-game, and tweak the range on when the gunmen detect you and then I can recommend it. Music changes and adding video settings along with the above changes would really improve it as well.
