Samurai E3 2005 Hands-On

Samurai is Jamdat Mobile's answer to mobile beat-'em-up games like Gameloft's Nightmare Creatures and Bandai's upcoming Double Dragon EX. This 2D, bushido-based brawler pays homage to classic games like Final Fight, Ninja Gaiden, and Kung Fu, where you had to fight off wave after wave of minions approaching from either side of the screen. After playing Samurai a little at Jamdat's E3 booth, we can say that this mobile warrior's pride may, in fact, be justified.

In Samurai, you have to recover your ancestral sword, which has been filched by a demonic warlord and spirited away to his fortress. There are six side-scrolling levels filled with spike traps, bats, thugs, and boss fights to deal with before the final confrontation. Fortunately, your samurai seems to have a perfectly serviceable backup sword to wax enemy ninja with, as well as a few other tricks up his sleeve--namely, a sweep kick, a throw, a dash attack, a magic spell or two, and daggers.

One of Jamdat's specialties is keeping ostensibly complicated games simple to play on mobile. Ergo, you can access all of these moves via simple directional combinations on the phone's nav pad, so control is blessedly simple. The game's sword-swinging action looks very clean on the LG VX7000. All of the characters are quite large, and the combat animations are really satisfying. Samurai borrows a couple of specific elements from the Final Fight and Double Dragon games, like a combo meter, doors that you hack to pieces, and enemies that blink as they expire on the ground. Overall, this is a very attractive game, from the animation to the parallax scrolling in the backgrounds.

Samurai looks like it will bring action fans a very solid jaunt through the games of yesteryear when it comes out this summer. We'll have a full review of this game as soon as we can.