The fuck? This thought has crossed my mind several million times whilst playing Grasshopper Manufacture’s latest: Killer is Dead.
What the fuck just happened, why the fuck is this thing trying to kill me, who the fuck is David? Dazed, slightly bewildered, but grinning like an idiot, that’s the state this game has left me in. It’s going to take a little while for it to all come together into some kind of coherent whole. Maybe after I’ve played through the game a couple more times I’ll understand. But I probably won’t.
Even at their most straightforward, Grasshopper Manufacture’s games have been bat shit crazy. A barrage of sex, violence and off kilter references to films, music and other games that some would deem offensive, especially if certain scenes are taken out of context. I’m sure certain aspects of Killer is Dead will be, but in many ways that’s the point.
They bait controversy and you can tell the people who bothered to sit down and play them from the people who haven’t. However underneath the gratuity there’s usually a question, a moral or some kind of polemic about society, there’s wit and a wry smile. You either get the joke or you don’t.
In a world full of movies and games that seem to be made by committee and with plenty of consumer feedback, it’s refreshing to play a game that forgoes all of that bullshit, doesn’t pull its punches and just goes out of its way to create an experience that will intentionally divide opinion.
Killer is Dead is in many ways the culmination of all of SUDA’s previous titles but completely new at the same time. It’s as referential as ever but now it seems that Grasshopper have turned their attentions inwards. Initially announced as a cross of No More Heroes and Killer 7, Killer is Dead takes those two very different games and merges them into a brilliantly bizarre whole that manages to mix the surreal aspects of Killer 7 with the dark humour and combat of No More Heroes.
In Killer is Dead you play as Mondo Zappa, a self styled ladies man and dab hand with a katana, who wakes up one morning to find himself with a bad case of amnesia, a spiffy new cybernetic arm and a job working for the Bryan Execution Agency, as a state sponsored executioner. Read: hit man.
Over the course of 12 episodes (thirteen if you get the limited edition) Mondo, with help from his hulking, cigar smoking cyborg boss: Bryan, beautiful British blonde bomb shell: Vivienne and Mondo’s manic assistant Mika, is tasked with tracking down and executing targets brought to them from various wronged parties which all require something to be retrieved from the target once they are dead.
However these aren’t your usual criminals, no, they are more super natural in nature, augmented with powers gifted to them by the malevolent ruler of the moon; David, a demi-god corrupted by the darkness of his actions.
Throughout the campaign you’ll travel the globe to varied, and often mind bending, locations each more ridiculous than the last including; a house that feels like it was built by Esher and Lewis Carol, a traditional Japanese manor house complete with ninjas and bamboo grove, a runaway steam engine in Siberia and a mansion on the moon.
Most of the game’s story missions, much like No More Heroes, are spent running from one area to the next, killing all the wires that appear and then moving on with little variation, occasionally you’ll have to find an object or a switch, or man a turret to take out a few waves of enemies, but by and large the game is that of dispatching large groups of wires with your katana and hand cannon from start to brutal finish. Although this sounds very repetitive the games minor asides, odd tone, varied enemy types and slick combat made it anything but.
For most of the missions though you’ll be fighting beings known as wires. Weird demonic automatons which make up the game’s rank and file which look a little like the Heaven Smiles from Killer 7, minus that horrible laugh. These come in many different shapes and sizes from normal mace or gun wielding types to colossal great things which knock you for six with every hit. Each new type requires a different tactic to defeat and figuring out the right time to block, dodge and counter attack is vital to succeeding in battle, especially at close quarters.
If you’ve played Lollipop Chainsaw or No More Heroes you’ll feel right at home with the games sword play. Tapping X swings your sword while Y performs a guard breaking punch attack. Tapping B performs a dodge, whilst holding it blocks. Simple stuff. Dodge at the right time and, much like No More Heroes, you’ll be able to perform a kind of counter, except instead of one strong attack, Mondo unleashes a flurry of strikes. Once you’ve successfully worn an enemy down you can also enter adrenaline mode which turns the screen grey and enables you to instantly kill weaker enemies and finish off larger ones with a single strike.
As you slay wires they explode into a puff of purple smoke showering you with one of three different types of crystals, each with a different effect: green levels up your health, blood red roses level up your blood meter and yellow moon ore which can be used to unlock new attacks and power up your sub weapons.
Although the evolution of your powers happens relatively quickly as you unlock extended combos, special attacks and increase the power of your gun arm, the game adjusts accordingly so that although it becomes easy to storm your way through previous campaign missions which are unlocked after you’ve finished your first play through, later missions still felt like the game was constantly throwing bigger, tougher and more insidious enemy types at you as you play.
The highlight of every mission is the final showdown with your target, each one crazier than the last. First up you have to fight the troubled Alice, complete with long blond hair and blue pinafore, who, in a slightly unsettling scene, turns into a giant cockroach that tears its way from inside her back as the room you’re sat in turns into a gingerbread house.
Then there’s the Yakuza boss with a tiger tattoo that leaves his body becoming a real tiger which he then rides, at which point you give chase on a motorbike in section akin to the bike battle in Final Fantasy VII before finally finishing the fight with both man and tiger in a sand garden in front of a pagoda and could I forget the gigantic alien baby with lasers for eyes, which you have to stop from destroying a small American town in the depths of the Nevada dessert.
My personal favourite though was Tommy the steam engine, a sentient runaway train that you have to stop from crashing into Moscow and exploding. That’s right folks, you get to kill a bastardised version of a beloved children’s character, oh but it gets better. During the final stage of the fight within his boiler room you’re attacked by something that comes out of his coal furnace that looks a hell of a lot like Freddie Kruger. If there was any doubt that this wasn’t an intentional Thomas the Tank Engine reference the achievement for finishing the mission is called ‘The Skinny Controller’.
Outside of the main campaign there are two other types of missions for you to try your hand at, numerous Challenge Missions and the game’s three Gigolo missions.
Challenge missions can be replayed as many times as you like and are a great way of grinding to get extra moon ore if you’re finding the main campaign a little too difficult or just want to unlock some new moves. Challenges range from the usual kill-everything-that-moves, to more interesting diversions such finding bombs hidden around the level and running over wires on a motorbike.
Gigolo missions, on the other hand, could potentially raise a few eyebrows, especially if you take them completely out of context and don’t understand what the word gigolo means.
Within these missions you basically go on a date with women that you meet in the game’s main campaign. In a kind of weird extended scene from a Bond movie, you spend all of a couple of minutes, trying to sneak a peek at the women ‘assets’ whilst they stare into the middle distance, tussle their hair and come onto you.
Sneaking a successful peek fills up your ogling gauge on the left. Once this is full you can give them a present to fill up the middle heart gauge to make them like you more. Presents are the usual stereotypical nonsense like chocolates, flowers and perfume.
Rinse and repeat until you fill the heart gauge in the middle at which point you and your new lady friend go somewhere else to be more… intimate.
However, much like real life, if your date catches you staring at their cleavage they don’t take too it to kindly at all. In fact, it’s well worth failing on purpose just to watch their reactions which are pretty comical.
In fact comical sums up the entire experience nicely. It’s as sexually arousing as a carry on film and about as gratuitous: winks, nods and a more than a little oo-er missus.
If you’re that way inclined you can also unlock a pair of x-ray specs which let you see the girls in their underwear for incredibly brief periods of time and tell you what kind of gifts they want. But they’re not required at all and real gentlemen don’t use such parlour tricks.
I could easily see, reading that back, how the whole thing sounds a little juvenile and maybe it is, it would also be easy to brand these optional sections as sexist.
Sure, the reward for completion of the mission as well as additional sub weapons and xp is a sex scene which gets more revealing if you complete the mission more than once, which is an absolute doddle, but the argument falls down because it becomes pretty clear, pretty damn quickly that it’s the women who are preying on Mondo, not the other way around.
In fact after you’ve completed the missions, from time to time during other missions the women you’ve romanced will call you up to complain that you haven’t seen them in a while, demanding you return to satisfy them.
However, the fourth Gigolo mission is somewhat more difficult. In order to woo Scarlet, you first need to complete a series of timed challenges which you need to unlock by first finding her hidden in various odd and out of the way places throughout the campaign missions.
Scarlet’s challenges include; trying to kill all the enemies with another explosive enemy type, killing everything without being able to block or by using a certain attack, trying to defeat everything without being hit and trying to rack up a combo of a certain hit count. On the whole these are incredibly tricky and managing to get to the end of the challenges is pretty difficult as not only are they tough to beat but Scarlet is incredibly well hidden.
It’s a good thing too because without these fun diversions, Killer is Dead is a relatively short game, completing my first play through with all the challenges, gigolo and about half of Scarlet’s challenges done, in just over ten hours. If you skip the side missions the campaign itself clocks in at about six.
However despite its brevity I’d still highly recommend checking out Killer is Dead. If you’re a fan of Grasshopper’s previous work it doesn’t disappoint, featuring all the violence, humour and surreal satire that has come to characterise the output of one of gaming’s bravest studios.
If you’re new to the weird world of Grasshopper Manufacture, Killer is Dead is a brilliant place to start. A highly original and stylish take on the hack ‘n’ slash genre that is a breath of fresh air in a gaming landscape dominated by sequels and conservative design.
