Written by: Ian

 

 

 

Just from the name, "Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad" is clearly one of those left-field Japanese imports that rarely get a release on these shores.

 

However, D3 has seen fit to bring this one over. Featuring dynasty warriors style hack-n-slash gameplay, zombies, and a collection of hot girls in bikinis and underwear, surely this is a winning combination?

 

 

The story in the game is pretty non-existent- in fact it would have been better if it were less present in the game. As is, the story involving a shady corporation, links to previous games in the series which have never been released outside Japan, and things about special blood are just confusing. It also doesn’t help that all the speech is still in Japanese, and that there’s only English subtitles. It certainly detracts from the story.

 

However, to be honest, rather than any attempt to be serious, it would have been better with a simpler plot that just had the female ass-kickers fighting some zombies for a wafer-thin reason.

 

 

The gameplay, like any most brawlers, is pretty simplistic. You run about, then use X, Y and B and combos of the three to launch into some attacks. You can also do some counterattacks, and use some other combos on bosses, but it’s not a hard game to pick up and play.

 

 

There’s also pickups and items to use, and if you gain eough blood, then you can enter berserk mode, where your health drains slowly, but you are way more powerful. Also, some enemies require you to be berserk to kill them. You also get your sword pretty bloody, and you need to shake off the zombie blood at intervals, otherwise your attacks become less powerful and then stop hurting the bud guys at all. It’s a neat system in general, and probably actually has a little more depth than your average brawler. Generally, it’s a lot of fun, and pretty satisfying, especially when slicing up armies of zombies, with blood flying everywhere, and limbs exploding all over the screen as you hack them off.

 

The game has 20 levels, which won’t take you too long to go through, but you also have to complete the game on different difficulty levels and complete certain quests to three levels to unlock everything, so the game is pretty good value for money, and will take an average gamer 15-25 hours to get most or all of the 1000 gamerscore on offer. For more casual players, one playthrough will take about 5-8 hours, however.

 

Unfortunately, there are some annoying problems. The camera is really quite dire. Whilst not too bad with the sword-wielding girls, with Anna, aiming and firing can be a real effort. You can lock on using RB, but at the same time, this rarely seems to go for the target you were actually aiming at.

 

 

Difficulty spikes are another huge issue, with really easy levels followed by crushingly difficult bosses that can take hours to grind through at low levels. Bike levels are also way more difficult than the rest of the game, and the driving model is probably the most appalling thing I’ve ever seen, and it also adds in some abysmal pop-in not seen since the days of the N64.