When you
first play Killer 7, one emotion – astonishment – fills your brain.
How can this be a serious gaming proposition? It’s a disappointment. You wanted and expected more from a game that looks so beautiful and dark and sexy, and it’s a shame that Killer 7 is presented in this way. Or is it?
Sales figures suggest the Japanese don’t like first-person shooters. At all. While their neighbours in China and Korea rack up untold hours in Counter Strike, the Japanese appear to simply turn up their collective nose at the entire genre. Halo 2 was as one of the biggest gaming releases of all time. In Japan, you wouldn’t have known anything about it.
Killer 7 offers seven playable characters - the Smiths - each with unique abilities and a shared love of swearing. Harman Smith is the disabled lead protagonist, though he has a split personality, able to transform into any of the other characters at any point. These include a blind boy with ultra-sharp hearing, an ex-wrestler, and a sexy girl with a scope gun who unleashes a torrent of blood by occasionally slashing her wrists. Opening her arteries opens up secret areas and such. She can also suck up blood using the same wounds. Lovely. You can power up all the characters by collecting the blood of slain enemies, invisible walking bomb monsters from the game’s bog standard mysterious evil force, The Heaven Smiles. All enemies have weak points that, when hit, cause instant death and each member of the Killer 7 marks this moment with a single repeated profane phrase.
It must be stressed that it is the story element of Killer 7 that is its trump card. From what we can gather, every character in the Killer 7 collective’s story intertwines, coming together at the end of this two-disc GameCube version with something of a twist. As you progress, you receive cryptic hints from carrier pigeons – no, really – hinting at the wider scope of the narrative. There is a lot of reading in Killer 7 and you spend a lot of time just holding down a button and watching the scenery go by.
The game is beautiful and dark and nasty and wonderful and sexy and intriguing and horrific and shocking in so many ways. The aesthetic powering the experience blends film noir with neo-Japanese punk style perfectly and, along with the storyline, is Killer 7’s saving grace. There is a market for this type of product emerging across the globe and it is to this market Capcom is no doubt pinning its hopes for its latest, somewhat bonkers offering. Gone are the days when Anime was the tiniest of niche markets, with the industry now grossing billions globally. Capcom’s main concern is however, is the exact crossover in the purchasing demographic between anime and videogames. Anime fans are as hardcore a group of entertainment consumers as any, yet they are used to being furnished with high quality videogames, be they related to Japanimation or not. As to whether they’ll take to something as unusual as Killer 7 will be interesting to see. For the record, SPOnG thinks they will.
It would be so easy to come away from a few hours with Killer 7 and slate the game – almost too easy, in fact. It would be just as easy to be shown the game and proclaim that yes, you are able to see the emperor’s new clothes, a tactic Capcom representatives, to their credit, never attempted to employ.
SPOnG liked Killer 7. A lot. It’s something new, showing true innovation - albeit somewhat retrospectively in its style of gameplay - in an ever-stagnating industry, based around an immediately attractive and unique brand new IP. If you want a third-person action game based around a license or you’re itching for a new FPS, go and buy one. It’s not like there’s any shortage of them. If you want something different, take a look at what Killer 7 actually
is, and make sure you don’t let yourself dismiss it for what it’s not.
