Guden Oden said:
People keep mention controls, what ARE the controls in this game? I bought P.N.0.3 because it looked good and found it had shitty controls, so I don't want to fall into the same trap again.
One button makes you run forward, no actual steering involved.
Another button makes you do a 180 so that you can press your button to run that way instead. No turning.
At different points you will come up to forks in your path, doors or other things that I will simply call 'crossroads' right now. At the crossroad you will be presented with the the option to steer into a different path - you move your stick so that you highlight one of the choices and press the button, now you can run down that path instead. Running around on a linear path like this has made it possible to use some interesting camera angles here and there, angles that would otherwise hamper your ability to play the game. It feels a bit more directed and dramatic compared to your average Resident Evil, but now and then you still get killed because of some cruddy camera angle.
Combat is simple, if you hear a laugh/screech when you're running around you press another button so that you go into first person mode.
In this mode you can't move, but you can spin around and look in any direction. This mode plays more or less like Virtua Cop or Resident Evil Dead Aim or any other lightgun game, except you're using a controller to aim.
Now, you just need to find the enemy and kill it. It's often somewhere in front of you, if you have a hard time aiming you press the button to autoaim at the enemy.
Then there's some basic puzzles and the standard "use ability X at place Y", but all the places you are supposed to use your abilites are marked out on the map - complete with what character you should use - so it's not entirely difficult to figure out what to do.
Well, I guess that's the basics of Killer 7, or all of it, the game is more or less just basics.
Is it any good?
I'm not sure, actually.
I can't really decide if I'm bored or having fun when I play it. It's somewhat shitty in its execution, but it's so easy to play(pres-one-butan!) that nothing is stopping you from picking it up and giving it a whirl when you're bored, except for the story that actually fights my will to play it unless I'm in the mood to read a lot of text and listen to the almost-static-noise* that comes out of the mouth of most NPCs that you run across - excluding cutscenes between missions.
So what about the story, is it really intelligent and well written? Nah, not really. Comparing the story or the game to anything that Lynch has done is not fair, they're aiming way too high, it's more like a shitty movie by Cronenberg.
Is it worth buying?
If you're just buying one game this month you should probably stay away from Killer 7. But if you buy 4-5 games this month then it's not such a bad idea to pick up Killer 7.
* The japanese version had machinetranslated(think Babelfish) dialog that was read by a voice synthesizer, which made everyone sound like a tin can version of Stephen Hawking. This was subtitled with the ACTUAL dialogue/monologue written in japanese.
Then came the western version of the game. I guess it didn't really make sense to have a rubbish voicetrack in english with properly written english subtitles, and they couldn't really remove the voices all together as that was part of the 'feeling' the game tried to create.
So they did it the easy way, they appear to have tweaked the parameters of the voice synthesizer so that you really can't make out what they're saying. It's on the edge of sounding like high pitched static noise.
