PAX Hands-On: Afro Samurai

One of the most surprising games that I played on Friday was Namco’s upcoming Afro Samurai, based on the Spike TV anime of the same name. I haven’t seen the show, which is kind of odd considering my man-love for Samuel L. Jackson, but the art style in the game intrigued me. It looks fantastic, like a gritty moving cartoon. I’m a huge fan of cel-shaded games, and Afro Samurai is one of the best looking.

No matter how good they look, anime games are usually pretty awful. The surprising part is that Afro Samurai is fun as hell. It starts out as a 3D brawler, you have a light attack on one button and a heavy one on the other. Stringing them together will create combos. One of the cool additions is a focus mode. When you hold a trigger, the world will turn white and time will slow to a crawl. Once you enter this, you have to hold down one of the attack buttons. Just as the controller rumbles, you must let go of that button. If your timing is right, you’ll be rewarded with an over-the-top decapitation. Afro Samurai is gratuitously violent, and the game doesn’t tone it down. There are literally fountains of blood. The brawler earns its inevitable M rating. It is based on a Sam Jackson cartoon, it wouldn’t feel right without a “motherf$cker” or two (which the demo had).

It remains to be seen if the fun of slicing people to bits will last more than a couple of hours, but Afro Samurai blew away my admittedly low expectations. I look forward to playing more when the game arrives in early 2009.