We get to review our own games!

Seems like Peter Molyneux is starting a sweet new trend where developers review their own games.  This sounded like a lot of fun, so I decided to take a short break from bug fixing to review The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.

Behold, your review, after the break:

The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai Review

Falling short of our expectations, and not even looking good while doing so.

I’ll go out and say it: The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is a game.  Before we got our review copies, we were under the impression that The Dishwasher was some sort of dating sim with undertones of reducing carbon footprints.  Well… sadly… no, this is fairly far from the case.  Not only were the promises of fetch-x-bring-to-y quests and whack-a-mole minigames dashed soundly, but every opportunity The Dishwasher had to remind us to live resource-conscience, carbon-neutral lifestyles was squandered.

As for the rest of the game, it’s a mess.

The graphics in The Dishwasher are 2D.  In this day and age, this is completely inexcusable: not only are 2D graphics completely inadequate at capturing our imaginations, but 2D–by definition–is not HD.  Playing a standard definition game on next-gen hardware hooked up to a monstrous plasma display just seems wasteful–much like that game’s treatment of environmentally-friendly messages.

The gameplay is basically broken.  The protagonist, a dishwasher, doesn’t actually wash dishes, at least not in the 30-40 minutes of game play we tried before writing this review.  Instead of dishwashing maneuvers, the buttons are mapped to meat cleaver and katana attacks, which won’t help you wash dishes in the slightest.  Even if we tried to rate the game on it’s combat aesthetic, we still see some rather nasty glaring ommissions, such as:

• Blades of Chaos
• A reasonably sized manskirt (knee-length seems appropriate)
• Nudity
• A boss the size of a large building that takes roughly forty-five minutes to beat, during which the hero must perform at least two dozen quick time events, transform twice, travel through time, and discover something important about himself

Like we said: basically broken.

The story for The Dishwasher is largely skippable, mainly because you have to actually read it.  Of course, to be fair, we may have missed an avid explanation as to why the game is not a dating sim as well as a few stern warnings about the dire state of the Earth’s climate.

We had a lot of high expectations for The Dishwasher, but we were left monumentally ensaddened.

Final score: 1/10