This newly released iPad version of a top iPhone game, Samurai: Way of the Warrior HD, is now going for an introductory rate of only $4.99. This game comes jam packed with cool graphics, fun sound effects, and an intriguing storyline. It’s a worthy download, at least at this price.
For this game, you are a rogue samurai, roaming the countryside in seek of revenge. Along your journey, you must slash, cut, and kill enemy soldiers in ancient Asia as you make you way to your targeted enemy.
The game’s controls are all composed of on-screen swiping. You can click a part of the screen, and your character will walk towards it. To attack, you can swipe up, down, left, or right to attack your enemy. On top of these basic attacks, you can do combo moves, done with multiple swipes on the screen. When the game begins, you have a limited amount of combo moves, with arrows to show you which directions to swipe, and in what order, to do the combo move. But as the game progresses, more combo moves are unlocked so that you can kill your tougher opponents more easily.
The game is pretty simple, you walk along a certain path until you kill all the enemies which are sporadically placed in your way or on the side. You can’t move on until they are all dead. If you die, you go back to the start of the path. In between each level, the game goes back into comic book story mode, and has 2-3 pages of semi-deep conversations between your character and his lady-friend or between the enemy and his cohorts. These usually try to sound ancient, but they end up sounding more 21st century then they probably should. Also, the page numbers at the bottom of these story pages don’t make sense a lot of the time, slight error. Sometimes they say1 of 2, then 2 of 2, then 3 of 3. This isn’t really important but somewhat annoying and shows a bit of a lack of attention to detail.
One of the main problems with the game is that it is hard to do combos with swiping while directing your character at the same time, since they are both done anywhere on the screen and at any time. Maybe they should make a directional pad for moving the character and one for attacking in order to make the combos easier. I found myself trying to move away from enemies, and sometimes my character would attack instead. Other issues are that sometimes the game will do a glitchy vibrate thing when you move into certain points on the map, and will shake until you move away from whatever is making you glitch. Also, the graphics try to make it seem somewhat 3D with the overheard view by having you walk under things, but sometimes battles occur around there, and you end up fighting underneath one of them, and can’t see what you are doing.
Overall, this is a pretty good game. The story lines are somewhat funny (on purpose?), the soundtrack fits along well, and then killing enemies by splitting them in half, or cutting off their heads and having blood spill everywhere is always fun as well. I would recommend getting this game for the current price, but if it goes up, I would be more hesitant.
