This game caters a bloody, fast-paced and accessible experience in a psychotic world, offering enough bang for the buck.
Anyways. The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is definitely another great addition to anyones arcade games collection. I remember exactly how I approached the game. I didn't anticipate this title because I haven't had time to play any games before its release and thus I wasn't much into games around the release date. However, one day I looked at the games available on the marketplace as I had some Microsoft points left I didn't use beforehand. Long story short: I checked out the demo and got the full game after enjoying every minute of the demo.
The Dishwasher is a somewhat bizarre game. The surreal and psychotic presentation is beautiful in a twisted way and the excessive violence evokes an adrenaline pumping gaming experience that manifests itself in the fast paced though accessible and easy to learn gameplay. The visceral control scheme ensures a short learning process to get the hang of the gameplay and its nuances. While the player starts out with the basic moves like slicing enemies with the sword he later utilizes guns, magic spells and a very useful dash move for his survivability.
Unfortunately within progress more and more enemy encounters involve a lot of button mashing when there are many enemies on the screen and that even affects the overview. As the game tends to become frantic in the heat of the battle you sometimes struggle to follow your character (especially in multiplayer) and make sense of what the heck you're looking at. But that's also one of the aspects where the game draws its strength from as it blatantly exaggerates the pacing of the gameplay resulting in a breathtaking looking game. I remember playing the game one day when my dad entered the room having a big "WTF-moment" and asking whether my brother and I were able to make sense of what was going on. Um yeah. Pretty funny.
Apart from the accessibility and the intuitive controls the game succeeds in showing great looking output without much of an input. That also made it easy to play it with a friend as there wasn't much explanation necessary. It's one of those "this-button-does-this-and-this-button-makes-this" explanations that are done in one minute. Basically it's a learning by doing process that makes it easy even for casual gamers to play it right off the bat.
The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile offers a single- and multiplayer which have separate storylines and are equal as long. To that there is an arcade mode which is fundamentally a horde mode where you decimate enemy wave after enemy wave which gets increasingly more difficult the longer you survive.
So there is enough bang for the buck because the game only costs 800 points which is a fairly low price compared to high budget titles. Take any action game for instance that is a 60 bucks purchase and you complete it in about 12 hours. The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile takes about 15 hours to finish, accumulating the hours of the storymodes in single- and multiplayer plus the time you may spend in arcade mode. No need to argue there, right?
Frankly speaking, playing the game was love on first sight as I enjoyed the demo rightaway so that I didn't hesitate to get the full version. The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile delivers an adrenaline pumping and fast paced gorefest that wears an apealing psychotic makeover. The control scheme, though tending to become button mashing, is beginner friendly, simple and accessible, but also powerful including all the fun upgrading the weapons and passive status improvements offers. In addition, the game has 4 difficulty settings, whereas the hardest mode is available after beating the game once. I didn't regret buying the game at any moment because it's available at a low price, though you'll spend a decent amount of time completing both stories and replaying the arcade levels like listening to your favorite songs in a symphony of slicing sword sounds and screaming enemies.