Samurai G Review - Screenshot 1 of 2

UFO Interactive's eShop releases seemed to be on a slow but steady progression towards quality, with Johnny Kung Fu almost breaking through this underwhelming barrier. But then along comes Samurai G to pee in everyone's cereal.

Samurai G is like being presented with a spoon and a bowl full of live bees: just one look is enough to grasp what horrors await, and one scoop later you find yourself with a mouth full of bees and it's unsurprisingly horrid. Confusion, stinging, pointless agony and existential questioning follow.

This title attempts the endless runner genre of which kids these days can't seem to get enough, with a dose of enemies to stab, obstacles to dodge and swat with a sword, and coins to collect. After collecting 100 coins the samurai is able to go into a temporary super-powered frenzy, slicing and dicing all invincible-like.

Samurai G Review - Screenshot 2 of 2

The whiffs are really quite impressive here, making us question whether anyone actually play-tested the poor thing before shoving it out the door, because the game fails at pretty much everything it sets out to do. For one, the drab colour palette and fine art style makes tiny obstacles nigh-impossible to discern in motion. The amount of focus needed to spot a smudge makes keeping track of anything else - like the constant barrage of ninja stars coming from all directions or instant-death ground obstacles - a Herculean task.

Getting hit once isn't strictly "the end" and instead chips away at a health bar - but suffering a blow does render you unable to move for a moment, meaning that an errant jump can lead to a chain of hits that will in fact spell your doom.

To make matters worse, stilted and horrid controls make the slightest danger nearly impossible to react to on the fly, demanding carnal knowledge that Samurai G in no way has earned the right to demand from players. How anybody thought that these controls were functional is beyond us.

Conclusion

Samurai G is a terrible, horrible, not good very bad excuse for an endless runner. It's satisfied with regurgitating genre ideas and didn't even take the time to think about how to make those ideas work well before charging people actual currency for a flimsy prototype. If there is any running to be done here, it is as far away as possible.