Seven Samurai 20XX PS2 combined the efforts of Akira Kurosawa's estate, artist Moebius and author Marc Handler. It should have been at least good. Instead, it is surprisingly boring.
I love the Seven Samurai movie and have seen it many times. I'm also an avid fan of sci fi movies. This seemed like the perfect combination to me, to merge these two genres together. Instead, everything was "dumbed down" and the result does not do credit to either.
The game is in essence a button masher. Everyone I've shown this to has played without looking at the manual, simply by taking the controller and mashing buttons. Enemies around you fly into pieces, your samurai swords spin, and you finish the level. Then you move on to a new area which seems fairly similar to the previous one.
The voicing and dialogue is nowhere near the powerful reaches you find both in Seven Samurai and in many sci fi classics. Instead it is rather silly. You don't become fond of the characters at all as a result. Sometimes you wish your swords were a little more under your control, to take out whoever you wanted to (and not just the "enemies").
There's no real sense of achievement after wiping out entire fields of bad guys, and a sense of dread builds as you plod into the next area, sure that more of the same awaits. It's not that often that we hit a game that every member of the household dreads playing - usually at least ONE of enjoys a game enough to have fun playing their way through it to do the review. However, this is one that all of us felt was agony to have to keep playing. There's just so many other better games out there of this style.
Rating 2/5 for at least having smooth controls.
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