The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai (Xbox 360)
Game designer James Silva spent a while working as a dishwasher and dreaming of the game he wanted to make, and while it wouldn’t be until he got a master’s degree in computer science that he’d make The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, it does feel like it embodies that angst and anger of a young man wanting to be more in a world that feels like it’s keeping you down. The sketchy art style, the enemies being cyborgs and zombies, and sections where you pick up an electric guitar and play it mostly because playing guitar is cool feel like the exact kind of thing a teenager would be excited to find in a game The embrace of bloody carnage could have made for an exciting and angsty beat ’em up platformer, but while the edgy aesthetic might look cool, that doesn’t mean the action is as cool to experience.
The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai takes place in a world where cybernetic enhancement is being embraced more and more by the populace, but our hero seems content to just work in his role as a restaurant’s dishwasher. The Dishwasher’s day job is interrupted when danger comes to him though, and as it turns out, he’s incredibly skilled with turning meat cleavers into weaponry. As taking on soldiers, zombies, and cyborgs sends him across the city, more and more The Dishwasher remembers his past life and what’s happened to him to make him such a target, most of these comic strip cutscenes including revelations as a way to keep piling on reasons he wants revenge against those in charge of the Cyborg Assimilation Movement. It doesn’t often go much deeper than giving The Dishwasher more reasons to get angry and go on his next killing spree, but it serves that role although perhaps the creator’s own tongue-in-cheek review of his game maybe seems to think it has some value based on him saying it has none when being ironic. It’s certainly easy to get into the action quickly whether you read the short strips or not though, although the gameplay is where things start getting a bit messy.
The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai’s action will lock you into an area with enemies gradually appearing you need to kill. You have some basic quick attacks that can be stringed together rapidly, but you can press directions to launch foes airborne or you can mix in heavy attacks that are good for knocking foes away. Grabs exist as well, your character invincible while he slams a foe into the ground but certain enemies like zombies can be instantly eliminated with a grab. At first, mashing the attack button and mixing in some heavy blows to wrap up a combo works fine enough, but as you get your first alternate weapon, the difficulty starts to ramp up. Your samurai sword is technically your main weapon, it giving you a teleport dodge that is more reliable and quick than the basic one but its sword swing combos are slower and a bit stilted until you get its pricey upgrades. However, your now secondary meat cleavers remain quick and versatile and over time you’ll get new secondaries you’ll likely use more than the blade.
The enemy design and arrangement is what ends up letting down this combat system. The first enemies you ever encounter are agents with guns, but it’s easy enough to keep them caught up in your attacks that you don’t realize how meddlesome gunfire is going to be down the line. When the soldiers who will disappear off screen and drop devastating grenades you have to avoid are added to the mix though, combat starts becoming more annoying since most long range attacks can deal serious damage but the grenades force you to abandon plans to clump up targets to keep them from attacking. Wide rooms start making it less likely you can group them up anyway and more relentless physical fighters demand immediate attention, and while you get different types of Dishwasher magic you can occasionally use to heavily damage most enemies on screen, getting health back is a sometimes difficult prospect. Enemies can be executed when they’re low on life but if you don’t use the right move, they’ll perish while only providing the spirals you use at shop robots. You can buy health refills you can carry with you from those shop robots, but it’s much more valuable to save them for weapon upgrades since they give you more combos and can even turn that stilted sword combat into something cleaner (provided you also find the guitar picks needed that are often your reward for the easy but rare electric guitar minigames). Killing a foe with the right move will get you some health, but interrupting your onslaught of attacks to take the time to see what button is above their head can be risky in a fighting system that can quickly get turned against you if you’re not remaining aggressive.
Things remain tough but manageable for a while, but later bosses and enemies start to gain edges by not being stunned by your attacks or just attacking through them anyway. Bosses like a giant walker mech and a cyborg viking in particular take a lot of punishment before going down and it seems the intent behind these fight designs is giving them time to do their missile salvo and charges respectively to whittle you down instead. Slow and careful play can get you through but also puts you at more risk since they can keep executing their attacks, and The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai unfortunately decides its approach to different difficulty settings is basically making things take longer to kill on higher difficulties rather than making them more elaborate or have battles that necessitate more strategy. If you want to try and learn a boss though you can check out a lower difficulty, the game only a few hours long so you can easily get up to the stage you were at and then hop over to the higher difficulty afterwards without losing progress… but another curious element of the difficulties will become clear if you attempt this. The weapon unlocks you acquire carry over, meaning if you get upgrades in Easy you can then tackle the harder difficulties with them right from the start. What this can mean is if you want to clear the harder stages, you can earn the better tools for tackling them and get past those annoying damage sponge bosses, although once you get the chainsaw, everything changes.
The chainsaw is a bit slower than your other weapons and not as conducive to combos, but it is so much stronger that The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai’s difficulty can start to dissolve once you grab it. In fact, some of the huge enemy clusters or rapidly attacking bosses in the late game feel like they were designed purely for chainsaw combat since otherwise they could be slogs, but the chainsaw instead pulls us back to how The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai felt in its early levels. Things start off feeling like a button mashing killing fest and when you get the chainsaw, they devolve back to that, but since enemies are so meaty, you won’t want to lean back on old weapons since it makes the game slower instead of more interesting. The chainsaw is a double-edged sword as a result, it makes the back half of the game easier to tolerate but also boils it down into something more mindless. It’s accessible but not as exciting as a fighting system that actually necessitated more attacks than constant basic swings.
A wealth of Arcade challenges at least seem better built as they limit you to specific weapons and throw you into small battle arenas with a theme, so you can’t just clear them all with chainsaw swinging and will sometimes need to figure out a fight rather than carve your way through it. Arcade feels like a decent attempt at longevity after the game essentially kills it in the story and it even seems a little smarter about what it will throw together into a room at times, but it’s not really going to tap into some secret inner depths unfortunately so The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai ends up a game stuck between annoying difficulty and tedious button mashing for most of the experience.
THE VERDICT: The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai needed to walk a tightrope to keep its fast-paced carnage thrilling and unfortunately it keeps falling off to either side of it. When it’s difficult it’s usually because enemies ignore your attacks or take too long to kill and thus get in enough strikes back to wear you down, but when you do have strong enough weapons to avoid the tedium you’re going to start tearing through them too easily and without much thought. The chainsaw carves through a lot of the later challenges with too much ease but also without it they’d likely be a slog to tackle, and while Arcade mode shows the game had some potential if things were arranged smartly, most of the bloody action of The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai will miss the mark in a way that makes it less than thrilling to push through.
And so, I give The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai for Xbox 360…
A BAD rating. The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai’s world looks like something a teenager might angrily scribble in their notebook, and one thing about giving your character cool weapons and having them fight tough monsters is it requires deeper consideration than just the surface level look. A boss in The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is made tougher usually by taking longer or breaking away from the rules of combat somehow and your own attack options aren’t layered enough to really give you a unique edge. Even before the chainsaw will likely homogenize your battle approach outside of rare moments like a midair sword fight, you’ll find battle is mostly about keeping foes busy so they don’t do annoying attacks like the grenade drop. The middle ground on that tightrope needed to be found, and that would have likely come from combos with more utility or ways to more directly counter specific enemies and attack types. The game will tell you ideas like using a heavy attack to rush into a charge but then it scatters other dangers around the arena so you can’t use this counter without being hit by something else, so when it does hand you a chainsaw that helps even the playing field, it’s hard to refuse its constant use. Perhaps weapons could have been the way to more explicitly counter enemy types and a flow for swapping between them could have made things fast-paced but engaging, but instead, besides things like a grab for the foes it instantly kills, the chainsaw really is all you’ll need once you unlock it.
While not his first game, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai was James Silva’s breakthrough title and much like it’s edgy aesthetic, it perhaps doesn’t deserve to be judged too harshly. At the same time, having cool bloody action also doesn’t make up for the hollow feeling its combat provides once you look past its surface. There is co-operative play even though it requires unlocking it a little bit into the story as well as a strange guitar controller based third-player option to alleviate some difficulty, but then again you’re also just draining the experience of meaningful battles because it doesn’t have a strong sense for structuring them. This scrappy effort might have its fans, but you’ll need to tolerate a bit of a mess if you want to wring out the moments where the combat feels like it really works.