Available on

Xbox Live Arcade!

Platform

Xbox 360

Genre

Action

Publisher

Ska Studios

Developer

Ska Studios

ESRB

M (Mature)

Released

April 6, 2011

- Beautiful graphic novel-style presentation and almost nonstop hacking & slashing action

- Not much of a story – a lot of it that doesn’t make much sense at all
- With so much blood spewing about and so much mayhem, co-op play can get confusing as to where your character is on-screen compared to your partner

Review: Red Dead Redemption (360)

Review: Prototype (360)

Review: Splatterhouse (360)

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The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile

Score: 9.0 / 10

For a guy who’s job is to make dirty things clean again, the dishwasher sure is a messy fellow – spewing the blood of all the enemies he faces all over the place in the new Xbox Live Arcade hack & slash game, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile.

A sequel to the popular 2009 XBLA title, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, Vampire Smile picks up where that game left off, still following the exploits of a seemingly harmless dishwasher who turns out to be a deadly killing machine, eliminating – with extreme crimson tidal wave prejudice all the evil in his way. The story doesn’t really make much sense at all, even as it is told in a beautiful, graphic novel-style

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presentation. Graphically gritty, with a style all its own, Vampire Smile is a simplistically stunning game visually.

At its core, Vampire Smile is a hack & slash 2D platformer with plenty of action – an unbelievable amount of sadistically addicting blood-splattering carnage at each and every turn. However, as much fun as it is to be samurai sword-splitting enemies one after

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another, it can get confusing where our little hero is on-screen when too much slaughter is occurring at once, especially during co-op play, where things can get very perplexing trying to follow one hero when the other is just as heavily involved in blood-shedding mayhem on-screen at the same time.

Despite the lack of story involvement, gamers won’t mind in the least as they’ll be too busy taking on waves of evil enemies, including a personal favorite old-school flavor: the Big Boss Battle. Each stage has a Big Boss that needs to be eliminated to advance to the next. Early bosses are easier as one could expect, with some intensely stressful ones in the farthest reaches of the game.

There’s more than just a samurai sword at the dishwasher’s disposal, though, because without the butcher knife of machine gun or other weapons, it would be nearly impossible to take down the multitude of enemies at varying levels of toughness. Weapons can be upgraded (as well as the hero’s health) by collecting enough points, and those weapons will really need that extra jolt to get through some of the latter levels. Also assisting in the assaulting is combo moves that can propel the hero from slicing and dicing one enemy right to another with specialized moves of mass destruction.

Beautiful and bountifully bloody, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is thoroughly enjoyable hack & slash entertainment at its finest, with plenty of crimson-colored co-op craziness to extend the gameplay hours even more.

- Lee Cieniawa
lcieniawa@armchairempire.com

(May 18, 2011)