Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma Volume 1
Posted by on October 19th, 2015 | 1 Comment | Tags: Afro Samurai 2 , Redacted Studios , Versus Evil
What do you get when you mix swords and afros together? You get Afro Samurai of course! The popular anime from 2007 had a game that was released on the Xbox 360 and PS3 and was rather good, even without knowledge of the TV show. It was a rather basic Devil May Cry clone with a nice cel-shaded art style to reflect the tv show, but is Afro Samurai 2 a worthy successor to the underrated 2008 game?
Unfortunately, I have to say no it is not a worthy Afro Samurai game or even a good game at all. While you don’t get to play as Afro himself, it’s still cool to see him there from the viewpoint of the bad guy from the first game, Kuma.
First lets start off with the good, the soundtrack. Right when you start the game up at the main menu, you’ll hear the very cool beats of RZA(Wu-Tang, Kill Bill). It’s an odd soundtrack but it fits in well with the game. The other positive thing is the cel-shaded graphics that are still in from the first game. One thing that the new Afro Samurai nails is the stylish comic book cut-scenes you’ll see every now and then. Now lets get to the bad stuff.
The gameplay is very simple and it tries to mimic the Batman combat style we all know and love, but there’s one problem. The collision detection is horrible and there’s no feedback to what moves you do. By this I mean that often times Kuma will not even do the correct attack animations you input. There is lots of clipping, glitches, and a whole bunch of lag. Pretty much all you have to do is mash on the square button and then, once you reach up to five combos, press circle to do a finisher and rinse and repeat about one hundred times. There is no variation to what moves you can do, the animations are slow and when you kill a guy it doesn’t even feel proper or smooth like it should. The lag I mentioned is the frame rate dropping a lot throughout the game. Even when your not in combat the frame-rate will drop to the 20-30 mark and there is a whole bunch of screen tearing as well which can be quite the headache. There was two times when I just had to restart the intro chapter because it glitched out and the cut-scene didn’t play.
The camera is also equally as bad. You can’t control the camera at all due to it being a fixed angle all the time and it’s a pain in the ass. Especially when there are some platforming levels later on and a chase sequence in which you have to rely on the god-awful camera. It’s a shame that Redacted Studios(yes that’s the actual name of the dev studio) couldn’t even manage to make a decent action brawler and instead just rushed out this glitchy, broken mess of a game. Oh and this is an episodic release too. Which means that you’re paying $15 for only one episode of the game or $35 for all three episodes. Just stay away from this one and lets all dream that one day Platinum Games will get to make a great Afro Samurai game, but in the meantime, if you have never played the original Afro Samurai from 2008, I would advise you to pick that up instead.
A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here.
General Info
- Developer: Redacted Studios
- Publisher: Versus Evil
- Platforms: PS4 (Reviewed)
- Release Date: September 2015
- Price: $14.99, $34.99(season pass)
- Genre: Action, Beat Em Up
Score:
What I Like:
- Good soundtrack
- Cool art style
What I Dislike:
- Hilariously bad voice acting
- Ton of technical issues
- Bad, dull gameplay
- Story is confusing