Do you want to play as an Japanese Samurai off to save the world from Demons and all manner of horrors, no matter how cliché this story is these days. Well…that’s good because that’s what Onikira Demon Killer is, not that cliché is always a bad thing, but sometimes it would be nice to have some difference come from these games at least. Now I’m not a big fan of 2D side scrollers, Braid wasn’t my thing, and since that released and exploded, I haven’t really enjoyed any others apart from Super meat boy really.
So, story, you have dragons and humans running around doing there thing, with a legend that If a human is able to bind a dragons soul to themselves, they basically become god. So of course after telling you this, someone manages to do such a thing, and becomes a evil bad guy and starts to rule everyone. The dragons at this point run off, they don’t want anything to do with the world and don’t want this to happen again. One dragon however willfully binds himself to another human to fight, but instead ends up dragon-ing (huh huh get it) him to hell instead as there power was too equal. In comes you, time to save the day as demons spread across the world again, I mean as far as stories go it has everything you want really, and that’s not a bad thing, it just felt a little cliché to me, and that really is not a bad thing at all but sometimes you hope to see something fresh. That said its not as though I could list you where I have heard this story before so, maybe I’ve just binged a little too hard on these themes personally.
Gameplay wise, its nothing but fun, over the top combos and throwing enemies across the screen in quiet the spectacle and very, very satisfying. Armed with a multitude of different weapons ranging from the starting Samurai sword, to pole arms and hand claw things, you have a wide and varied arsenal to wipe out your foes. Each weapon has a different way of attacking and different stats, the first item you get are the claws, which let you attack very fast but don’t do as much damage as other weapons. Pole arms let you attack much further away but are a little slower, so you need to judge what weapon you need for each situation and each fight. You really do need to pick the right weapons especially when you fight the screen filling bosses in this game, whilst its not likely that choosing the wrong weapon will end up with you loosing the fight, it does make some of them more difficult.
Whilst on the bosses, they are some nice looking bosses, and fairly varied too, with attacks being a little more varied than, “Lets use three attacks repeatedly” that you seem to get now, and it was satisfying to beat them. Gameplay wise I would have to say this game reminds me heavily of a 2D Metal Gear Rising, which if you enjoyed that game, will understand why the combat is so satisfying here.
Graphically the game looks, well it’s a very stylized game, but not one that I enjoy, it is very reminiscing of those indie side scrolling games you found on the 360 store around 2011-2012. It’s one I didn’t enjoy then and one I don’t enjoy now, but there are people who will enjoy it though so take a look at the screen shots before you make that choice. Though what frustrates me, and take this with a grain of salt as this is a dev build, is that I get both slowdown and stutters when I play, now I’m not running a top tier machine here, but a i5 and GTX 770 isn’t something to sniff at, so I don’t expect problems when playing a 2D plat former. With that said, there are some nice effects and everything is nicely detailed as you would expect, again a nice stylized graphics, just one I don’t really like.
Tiny little niggle that bothers me, and I’m not sure why is the resolution setting, it works as well as it can, I mean all it does is choose the resolution, but why does Left increase the resolution and Right lower it! It took be far too long to realize that it was the game and not me, and somewhere deep inside me, it bothers me, it bothers me a lot.
Whilst I’m not going to be singing out none stop praise for Onikira, it’s not as if it does everything wrong, nor right. It’s definitely one of these games that you can turn on, lay back and just enjoy without thinking too much about the story and just focus on the gameplay, which I think far too many games miss these days. That said if you are looking for a game with a gripping story you might want to look else ware, or at least try to enjoy the story, which isn’t bad but nether is it outstanding.
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