Samurai Jack: The Shadow of Aku

"Not the greatest hack n' slash game, but it's still fun in someways"

I never really followed the cartoon show closely, though the episodes that I did watch gave me a good impression of what the series is about. The story is about a Samurai who was warped into the future upon his victory against Aku, cowardly using a cheap trick to stall his defeat. Now, the young Samurai travels around the world in search for a portal that will take him back to the past, and undo what Aku has done. Through out the course of the game, you'll be doing a lot of sword fighting, as well as doing some platforming.

The entire series is based on Jack finding a portal to the past. The game uses the same concept, except Jack never finds a damn portal, since he is to stubborn to kill the damned Aku in the current time, and just simply redo what has been done. Through out the whole game, Jack will be assisting the villagers of the area he's in by defeating Aku's minions that persist to poison the world. The storyline is simple: Jack doesn't find a portal.

The game uses the same visual style that the show uses, which was done pretty poorly. Jack's head is relevant to a rectangle, and the lack of diverse colours used brings it down even more. There's a slow motion effect that completely stops the enemies movements instead of actually slowing down time. Aku's army looks better in the game rather than they do in the show, but the show's enemies looked below mediocre, and the enemies here are mediocre looking.

At first, the gameplay may seem like another basic hack n' slash game, though it's actually deeper than you think. Jack has two types of slashes, a weak one and a strong one, giving out different effects, as well as two ranged weapons, ninja stars and bows and arrows. The two different slashes can be used to string together combo attacks, which can look pretty cool when defeating a bunch of enemies at once. The ninja stars and bows and arrows are practically pointless to use, since both are rather weak, and by simply blocking the enemies ranged weapons, their weapon mirror back towards them, killing them instantly.

A lot of enemies are like that too, with only one slash, they'll be destroyed. The only time your combo attacks will come in handy is when numerous enemies surround you, and even then they'll be quickly destroyed by a slash or two. Even at the hardest difficulty, the enemies will simply die in a hit. The only difference between the easiest and the hardest difficulty is that you're more sensitive to damage, where you can easily dodge and jump avoiding the damage.

Though later on, you'll be rewarded with more challenge by having much stronger enemies thrown at you, which will be you on your toes at times, or will it? The sad thing is, is that the game tries to overload Jack with health replenishers, as well as supportive shields, which can become overprotective at times. In an attempt of giving you a break from hack n' slashing, the game throws in a platforming side to it, which is much more poorly done than anything else in the game. Because of how rough the controls are, it'll be quite difficult for you to make a desired jump, resulting in frustrated moments. You'll be doing things like jumping from car to car, jumping from platform to platform, which can be frustrating because of poor controls.

What does stand out from everything else is it's beautiful sound. Many of the shows actors make an appearance in the game, and their voice acting is superb. Jack's slashes from his sword sounds really great; sounds very authentic to their show counterpart, and the robot grunts performed by Aku's robotic army sounds exactly like the show's. It's as if you were watching an actual Samurai Jack episode.

An okay attempt by Sega and Adrenium, though as mentioned by the director of the game in the Samurai Jack message board, little money has been put into creating the game. For a small studio like Adrenium, they've done themselves a great job creating their first game, though as a game itself, there's still a lot of improvements that are more than welcomed. The game isn't bad, it's just that it's quite flawed. Those fans of the show should at least check out this game.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/20/04