Game Review

I decided to do my video game review over Way of The Samurai 3. I did my review over the Xbox 360 version of the game. I was absolutely thrilled when I heard they were making a third installment of this series, I have been playing it since the first one on the Play Station 2.
For the most part the game is absolutely awesome. It follows the same concept as the previous games. The player of the game plays as a samurai and based on the choices that the player makes the outcome of the story will change. The game has not changed too much from the previous two titles of the series. The player gets to customize their character looks and name him. The customization is very limited when you first start the game, but as you accomplish certain things in the game you can unlock new clothes and things like that and the more you get unlocked the more you can pimp out your samurai.
Another cool thing the game does is give the player titles. If you end a stage after doing a certain thing the game will reward you with a title, which is a little like an accomplishment except without points or anything. For example when I first started all I did was steal vegetables from people’s gardens and when I died I had a bunch of them still on me so I unlocked the Vegetarian title, which was cool to me since I am one. Besides collecting title and unlocking new clothes the player can also pick and customize swords that they have either bought or stolen from a dead body. Just about anything in the game can be used as a weapon. My favorite weapon in the entire game is an onion. The onion has some really awesome combo attacks and can block just about any attack that your enemy may attempt to use against you. Cool weapons and titles are just part of what made me love this game so much.
The other thing that helped make this game awesome was the game play. The fighting mechanics of this game is really cool. It is not like most button masher/hack and slash games, where you run around hitting the same button over and over again. There is some type form of strategy involved, not much but enough to make me like the game. The player should not attempt to spam the “A” button through every fight, attacking an opponent while they are blocking damages your blade or onion and after so long it will break. So, the player need to find a way through their opponent’s guard, this aspect makes fighting a little less tedious. Another part of the game play is being able to be good or evil. Just like in the previous games the player could determine their fate in the game, but in this one you can pick on the weak and steal their stuff. Based on what decisions the player makes the ending of the will be different and there are over twenty different endings for this game. Between unlocking all the endings, unlocking all playable characters, finding all of the weapons and unlocking all of the clothing the game easily offers over 40 hours of game play as well as a reason to keep playing the game over and over again.
This game is really awesome and has great concept, but sadly everything about the game is not good. One of the biggest issues with this game happens to be the game design. The graphics look dated, it seems like the designers used an obsolete game engine when it came time to render the game art. Not only are the graphics a little crappy but they does this annoying lagging thing. When the characters walk in a muddy area, their foot hit the ground and then a second or two later the mud splashes up from the ground. At first I thought it was just my Xbox 360, but after playing it on other Xbox 360s (I think that is how you make that word plural) it turned out to be a rendering error. However the worst thing about the entire game was the text. The text in the game is really small and impossible to read and since you have to read everything that happens in the game this is a big problem. I can deal with bad graphics but not knowing what is going on in a story because the text is so my small is just not right. The only other annoying thing about the game is that you cannot kill people who do not have a weapon and you cannot kill children. It is hard to destroy a village and work towards reaching ultimate evil when they limit who you can kill so you have to be like really rude to them and that takes from the game play, I hate being limited. That is pretty much it for the bad stuff in the game.
It is a fun game and the player can play it over as many times as they want and still find new things. There are a bunch of interesting things that can be found or unlocked within the game. The graphics are pretty bad and hurt the game’s visual aspects. For some reason the text in the game is really hard to read, that happens to be the biggest problem in the whole game. The game limits what characters the player can kill so the player must try to invent news to be evil, or just be a good guy that is still an option, it is the player’s choice. Overall it is an awesome game if you are into the Fable type video games, if not it is a good game I would give it a 3 out 5.