Killer is Dead Review

So, this is the first game I've played by auteur game director and developer Goichi Suda, better known as Suda 51. Suda had made his career by making some very weird games, and exploring his fetish for assassins, katanas, cell shading, and presumably watching Tarantino films on large cocktails of drugs. He was very well known, and gained creative freedom for his own projects after the cult hit Killer 7, a pretty incoherent and weird game about assassins fighting aliens or something, and I really wanted to get my hands on it. Unfortunately, the only one of Suda's games to come out on Steam is the very stylish and completely surreal Killer is Dead, something of a spiritual successor if his fanbase is to be believed.

So, going into this game, I had no idea what I was in for, and man was it a genuinely unique experience. I don't know if this is the style that Suda usually brings to his work, but if it is, I would love to have a chance to play some of his other games. So, without further ado, I present to you a review of Killer is Dead, my Suda 51 cherry-popping if you will.

Storyline

So......trying to sum up Killer is Dead's story. Um......yeah, it's pretty odd. We play a cyborg named Mondo Zappa who is some kind of state sponsored assassin, who gets hired out by every Tom, Dick and Harry who happens to wander into the office. Your targets tend not to be humans as such as really surreal monsters from the moon, called Wires. This is a world that includes extradimensional candy houses, vampires, cyborgs, unicorns (really), aliens and all sorts of less-describable things, though no one really seems to find any of that the least bit odd. Your clients are even stranger, including a ghost, a princess from the moon and a shapeshifting sparrow. The story seems to revolve around some kind of evil energy that turns people into monsters, controlled by a deranged looking man named David in an outfit that makes Dr. Frank-N-Furter's look restrained.

Yeah. This guy. Even the main character thinks he looks like an idiot.

Despite the hefty amounts of total, batshit insanity, the story is actually......quite good, really. It takes on a dreamlike atmosphere where the emotions of the characters and their relationships to each other are a lot more important than what is literally happening. Mondo is a surprisingly deep and flawed protagonist (even if he is aware that he's a character in a video game) and clearly has a code of conduct and a conscience despite being an assassin for hire. His comments here and there indicate a kind of warrior-poet mentality that really contrasts with the crazy world he's in. It's a strange kind of balance that makes him relatable and makes the world more approachable, because we have one character who reacts like a normal, sane person.

The other characters are equally memorable and quirky, with your energetic, schoolgirl dressed assistant, the badass, sour and stripperific assassin lady who's more concerned about a paycheck then morality (and inexplicably has 7 sets of retractable arms) and the cyborg head of the organization, who's both jovial and comes off as deeply regretful and contemplative of his time as an executioner. The baddies are equally interesting, despite the game taking a 'monster-of-the-week' formula to its levels, with some absolutely amazing and imaginative boss design, like a Yakuza boss who can animate his tiger tattoo, or a lich who owns a recording company and aims to drown the world in noise. It really comes together to make a bunch of characters that seem familiar despite being surrealist fantasies, and a story that fits together like an awesome and bloody dream.

Gameplay

This is really where the game shines and where it goes from being a series of odd cut scenes and becomes a fully fledged game in its own right. Combat is its bread and butter, and once you get used to the system, it becomes barrels of fun and still remains challenging despite being fast paced hack n slash. The main 'mana' component is blood (collected whenever you hit an enemy) that is used to power the functions of Mondo's cyborg arm (which morphs into a chaingun, a giant drill, a freezing gun and a charged laser blast), which allows players to take on something of a temporary, third person run and gun approach. Now, the thing that did annoy me was that the instructions were really unclear in the English prompt, which might be a bad translation, but the game really jumps headfirst into the action with little warning or tutorial. It also forces you to play with a certain key configuration, that I, as a lefty found quite uncomfortable until I forced myself to get used to it. None of these things really break the game, but man, do they make the learning curve sharp, especially when a large amount of combat involves swordplay, parrying and dodging. 

The mission formula basically takes an episode based format, where Mondo is hired by an increasingly bizarre bunch of clients to go hunt down an increasingly colorful and hammy string of supervillains. Once each level is complete, sidequests within the level open up, and while I think the formula does well to go for the sort of 'serial novel' or 'anime' approach they were going for here, the sidequest missions are pretty samey and exist largely for the purpose of grinding. The main plot features some gorgeously designed levels and enemies, but the side missions feel tacked on and lazy, a contrast that doesn't really fit together. I would have much preferred them to ditch the sidequests and extend the terminally short main campaign a bit longer, to explore a bit more of the characters and the crazy world.

Now, the gameplay cannot be discussed without talking about the infamous 'Gigolo Missions,' which got this game a fair amount of controversy. Now, this is where I usually take off my political correctness hat with things like Postal 2, but I can kinda see where the naysayers are coming from. These missions basically involve seducing women by peeking at their underwear through your X-ray specs and giving them presents, at which point, they give you a weapon or power up. Now, it's obviously not taking itself seriously (I mean, the underwear X-ray mode is called Gigolo-Vision for chrissakes), and I respect that, but it does seem pretty pointless for anything other than fanservice. The ladies don't really have any interesting personalities (the only girls who have character are frustratingly un-seducable), and basically exist to be molested with your eyes. Again, I get that it's a joke, but it's a joke that stretches on for way too long, and it again, makes me wonder why all these pointless things were tacked on when they could have been working on the main campaign.

Art/Style

 I cannot go on about this enough. While the game makes some pretty questionable design decisions, the art direction is top-fucking-notch. The entire game is done in this wonderful, stylized cell-shading, that adds a great level of sleekness to the story. The magic-realist design of every character works in such a way that despite each level basically being a self contained story, they all fit together in the same crazy world that I genuinely started loving. It's fast paced and doesn't bother justifying its ideas. It's cartoonish and dreamlike and still visceral and bad-ass. Everything that happens, regardless of how crazy (seriously, that gold-dressed stripper dude with the sword? You fight him in his mansion on the moon), just clicks like a deranged jig-saw puzzle. Despite the shoddy length and the somewhat pointless sidequests, I make no exaggeration when I say that this is reason enough to purchase it. Killer is Dead is a unique experience, one that looks and feels different from everything else on the market. It is to be applauded because it's a game that really isn't afraid to try new directions, challenge its audience and force them to come to their own conclusions about what's going on. If the art and style were any less directed, the game would fall apart as a totally disconnected mess, and yet the re-occurring themes, the animation, the very odd dialogue and the symbols tie it together into a chaotic, but ultimately unified story. 

Conclusion

Is this game perfect? No, certainly not. It has an incredible amount of potential and a flood of great, new ideas, but shoddy choices in implementation. It's like someone who's excited about his new story idea and vomits it all out at once. It's messy, it's chaotic, it's organic, but ultimately it's good. If it had spent a bit more time in the editing and design departments, it really would be fantastic. Still, it's definitely a gem I enjoyed, and one I can count as one of my favorites, and its definitely a game I'm going to try for 100% completion for.  It definitely, for me at least, represents a direction I'd love to see the gaming industry take, one that isn't afraid to explore into new and strange realms, and if you're ready to take a ride with Mondo Zappa, and let his surreal dream-world wash over you, it's an experience that will stay with you, and one that you won't regret.

Rankings:

Gameplay - 4/5 - fun controls, when you figure out how to use them.

Story - 4/5 - Deep and thoughtful, if expressed through a violent acid trip.

Atmosphere - 5/5 - Surrealism and magic realism action at it's very best.

Art Direction - 5/5 - Absolutely stunning.

Level Design - 3/5 - Great levels, but repetitive and pointless side quests. 

Fun Factor - 5/5 - Genuinely huge amounts of fun, and rarely ever gets boring.

Overall Rating - 4/5 - A great, fun experience for fans of surrealism and cyborg ninja assassins.

 

- Kephn