Ooh look, a Samurai game! They're like Ninjas... ish. Well worth a look then eh? Even if you're not a fan of the TV series you can surely appreciate a game that has been stylised like a cartoon, has Samuel L. Jackson mouthing off and a bloody body gore count that rivals Kill Bill. I must admit, while I'd heard of the series, being a bit of a Manga fan, I had no idea what it was about. So in effect, had no idea what a game called “Afro Samurai”, of all things, would be.

Turns out it's a 3rd Person hack-n-slash with an emphasis on violence and bad language, which I might add is fine by me. It does, after all, lack a storyline that you can sink your teeth into. It's pretty good sure, but because it reeks of Manga, it tries it's hardest to throw you off like trying to ride a bull that's been given a years supply of steroids and has just noticed the fields only cow sunning herself in a particularly attractive fashion.

It is therefore easy to summarize the story as you being the big-haired son of some dude that got his head cut off by some other dude you're trying to track down to kill. All the while kicking the living Beelzebub out of anything that moves. To try and explain that guy that's following you around all the time... well, for now lets just call him a quit-witted wise-talking force of nature that wants to bare witness to Afro's story.

Right.

There are several headbands that appear throughout the storyline. Afro carries the “number 2” headband that allows him to directly challenge “number 1” upon winning such a contest granting the owner a Godlike status. Not that Afro cares of course, he's out for plain ol' revenge.

The game works much as you would probably expect from a game of this genre. Light attacks, heavy attacks, kicks, string 'em together for combos, blocks and parries etc etc. Well yeah, it's got all of those in and has one more additional feature to play with. Afro can go into a Focus mode that slows time, turns everything black-and-white and allows him to do some powerful moves, from the usual slice-n-dice to reflecting bullets. He can also go into an Over Focus mode that, while spending all his collected energy in one go, means you get to zip around the screen one-hit-killing everything you see.

They've made the game look awesome in a cartoon stylised cell-shaded way. Well no, it's more than that, everything appears drawn, rather than just rendered in a specific way. It's really well done, other than perhaps the blood not always reacting as you'd expect – and I would've loved to have seen more gore than was given. Somehow it all felt a little toned down compared to the violence.

I think generally what surprises me is that they spent all the budget on making the game look and sound great (who doesn't want to hack up bad guys to hiphop supervised by Rza?), and then hired the cheapest camera guy they could find to follow Afro in all the ways you wouldn't want. When fighting a boss, the last thing I think on the list of things I'd want to stare at would be the inside of a wall. Strange no? At any rate, that's what I'd get – that or a tree. The camera man, lets call him “Dave” for now, had a friend “Mike” who he got a job to work on the collision in the game. Now, together they made a truly powerful team. Dave would proceed to roger you with an awkward angle while Mike would truly shaft you with an invisible object. Combine this with a section that might ultimately have you falling to your death if you fudged the section up and on some levels, you'd be truly sore from spending too much time with Mike and Dave.

They then gave “Goons for Hire” a call, who as it happened had a special discount on “Buy 5 identical Morons, get 6th free!”, which they took advantage of by grabbing, oh say, 600 of the bastards. The edge is taken slightly off the countless waves of familiar enemies by the fact that chopping them up into tiny pieces is so much fun. And isn't it funny how hordes of enemies tend to fit into 2 catagories – you either get them taking turns to hit you, or randomly choose when to hit you. The latter of the 2, which Afro Samurai follows, can be exceedingly frustrating if you can't get out of the way. You're quite happily passed around like a bottle at an AA meeting and get about as much enjoyment from the whole experience. They aren't alone in this, I'm just not sure there's actually a good system out there that exists to stop either of these mundane alternatives being used.

Afro Samurai's good, but glitchy, which is a shame. These little bugs can crop up from anything as simple as cutting some rope (you know, with your freakin' sword) or a boss fight where you don't really know what's going on. A little more variance and some time spent polishing and I think this game could've really been “up there”.