The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile takes the series’ stylistic fast action, deep gameplay and unique visual style and kicks it up a few blood soaked notches!
GenreAction Adventure
Platforms xbox360
DEVELOPER Ska Studios | PUBLISHER Codemasters | RELEASE DATE
The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile Reviews xbox360
teamxbox.com review
The game play is carried off with flair, mucho style and a real dramatic sense so that even in quiet times, the walls practically drip with dread and foreboding. There are secret areas to find with valuable items you’ll need on your way, and you’ll even be able to buy goodies along the way from supply points. Make sure that whenever your not laying the utter smack down on the bad guys you’re checking out the environment for secret stashes and routes.
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planetxbox360.com review
The single-player game is entertaining, with plenty of carnage-inducing moments that are worth repeating. It gets hard too, but you can adjust difficulty as you wish. There’s also a Pity Princess difficulty available, which, apparently, video game reviewers love. (That’s what the Achievement told us.) But if you really want to get the most out of the game, you’ll invite a friend along, either online or local. One of you controls Yuki, while the other controls the Dishwasher, and you go through each stage, shredding secret agents and zombies and having a complete blast doing it. All Xbox Live Arcade games need a co-op factor this good. Along with the gameplay, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile also shows vast improvements in the presentation. The game’s music is nothing short of awesome, almost as if it were ripped straight out of a stylish Hong Kong action flick. Furthermore, the game does without lame voicework, instead using quaint sound effects that fit the bill, loud shouts of “HYAHHH!†with each attack and cool enemy noises, such as roaring monsters and beeping robots.
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gamestyle.com review
Dish Challenge mode sees you battle against an endless wave after wave of enemies. This alone will put all your gaming skill to the test. This isn’t a case of slow build up of lesser enemies in smaller number, leading to harder enemies in larger numbers. The action is intense from the outset and in your first few attempt it will be a struggle to last longer than three minutes. You will find it hard to stop though.
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palgn.com.au review
Vampire Smile is extremely violent, easily one of the bloodiest games on any platform. The manner in which enemies are dismantled is incredible, rewarding players for combining the various death tools at their disposal. Unlike Dead Samurai, the enemies here are more varied. The suited goons are updated, but you’ll have to deal with newer enemies which crop up faster than anticipated. Inside one level, it’s possible to encounter a couple of fresh faces (mechanical or otherwise), and it greatly improves the overall pace of the game, alleviating any drastic jumps in difficulty. The only real fault throughout the entire game is a teeny tiny issue that we had with the bosses. They’re all completely bonkers and twisted, but they don’t require any special tactics. Ripping into their skulls is met with enormous satisfaction, then again, either character will be dashing and slashing as if it were a normal encounter. Gratefully, the combat is still very rewarding through fresh ideas and an upgrade system that, while not entirely necessary, does up the ante.
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spaziogames.it review
No Synopsis Available
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gamerstemple.com review
Once you get through the game’s story mode – which you can play as "The Dishwasher" or the femme fatale Yuki, or both in co-op mode – there are other modes that will test your kill skills and let you compare them to others’ via the game’s leaderboards. Arcade mode is a progression of short battles against progressively tougher competition in which beating a level will unlock the next. You can revisit any of the levels that you’ve unlocked to try to improve your score and leaderboard ranking for the level. With fifty levels, Arcade mode will keep you busy for quite some time. Another mode known as the Dish Challenge will test your stamina as you try to stay alive for as long as possible against an endless stream of foes. Replay value here is in the form of beating your previous best or improving your leaderboard ranking, so your mileage may vary depending on how much that sort of thing motivates you to keep playing a game
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gamestm.co.uk review
Dead Samurai can be seen as a two-dimensional riff on the modern Ninja Gaiden template, Vampire Smile must be Ska’s take on Bayonetta. The ante has been upped. We previously saw a one-man studio with its sights on the same kind of mechanical complexity that the genre’s finest gaily flaunt, but perhaps with an ambition greater than its reach. Today, we see a one-man studio in unstoppable form, balancing complexity, freedom, difficulty and creativity more skilfully than developers ten times its stature. The template remains largely the same – grab an unconventional weapon and murder your way to the credits – but the journey incorporates far more shocking twists and inventive turns than the game’s combat emphasis suggests.
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oxm.co.uk review
Silva has added a Pretty Princess difficulty setting. Replacing the infinite amounts of gore with rainbows and cuddles, it’s a defiant "eff you" to the reviewers who said the first game was too hard. But you shouldn’t need it: Vampire Smile’s Normal mode is entirely negotiable. You might even be tempted to try out Ninja difficulty.
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gamespot.com review
The flaws are few and carry over from Dead Samurai. You can initiate a rhythm game in which your character grooves to a metal beat while you punch on the appropriate series of buttons. Considering the grinding guitars that accompany your journey, these moments fit well with the game’s overall ambience, but they break up the pace too much. At least this is an optional diversion.
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ztgd.com review
The Dishwasher is a fairytale of sorts for game developers. The original game was created as an indie project by Ska Studios and was so good that Microsoft picked it up for the XBLA program. The original game was known for its brutal difficulty, fountains of blood and gore and, of course, some slick combat. It was also known for having some unforgiving checkpoints that made it a truly hardcore action title, the end of which most players would never see. With the sequel, the developers have definitely taken the criticisms into account. Vampire Smile feels more streamlined and certainly more approachable.
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joystiq.com review
Vampire Smile sports two solo campaigns for players to choose from. Sure, they can reprise the role of The Dishwasher, picking up his story in the aftermath of the first game’s apocalyptic finale. But the real star of Vampire Smile is Yuki, The Dishwasher’s prodigal stepsister and the default protagonist of the game’s narrative. With a slouched, sullen demeanor and curly black hair hanging over her eyes, Yuki channels the now-clichéd "dark-haired creepy J-horror girl" archetype, though thankfully retains some of her own identity as well. That’s largely due to the endearingly goofy touches at the margins of her character — her gleeful embrace of new magical powers, her giant electrified JRPG "Cloud Sword," her flying feline familiar Paka, and the gatling-gun/chainsaw attachment that she wears in place of her severed arm.
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gamefocus.ca review
Microsoft’s Dream-Build-Play program is easily one of my favorite competitions. It pushes the Indie crowd to strut their stuff in an attempt to break out of the independent mold and into a more mainstream limelight. In 2007, we were given The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai from Ska Studios.While it still felt like an Indie title, playing through it made it tough to imagine that Ska is pretty much a one-man band. James Silva’s side-scroller up did two things: It gave us a fun, if not slightly rough, beat ‘em up and also, by winning Dream-Build-Play, it pushed the man behind it to grow. And grow he did, as evidenced by the sequel, The Dishwasher 2: Vampire Smile…
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gamechronicles.com review
There are two different playable characters in the game, Yuki and the Dishwasher. Yuki has a far more interesting narrative as she is battling her own internal psyche along with the many enemies. The Dishwasher is sort of just fighting because he hates cyborgs. With Yuki there are a lot of interesting sequences in place purely for their narrative functions, and even a couple of surprises that will keep you going to the end. The Dishwasher just sort of kills everything as fast as he can. The two characters play differently, but not enough to make the experiences dramatically different. They each have access to different weapons and magic attacks, but they all essentially function the same.
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gametrailers.com review
The challenge level in the Dishwasher is nearly pitch-perfect, skillfully walking the fine line between punishment and reward. You’ll become quite familiar with the checkpoints, but you’ll always feel like you’re chipping away at progress. If you dig the look and like challenging, bloody games, you can do far worse.
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game-over.com review
Despite the game’s robust combat system and level of ability customization, Vampire Smile suffers from quite a bit of repetition. For the most part both of the campaigns have you exploring the environments where you’ll get locked in a room until you defeat every enemy in there, which then unlocks the doors. Then you’ll proceed to the next area, repeat, move on to a boss and the entire cycle starts over again. As a whole the story is pretty nonsensical, but Yuki’s story is made a little more interesting because of her continuous mental struggle. You’ll be fighting a horde of enemies only to flash back to Yuki in a mental hospital. It’s a welcome change of pace that keeps you engaged for the most part, but I feel it’s an idea that could’ve been explored better.
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multiplayer.it review
No Synopsis Available
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gameinformer.com review
The first Dishwasher game was one of the most action-packed, fast-paced games available on Xbox Live. Its sequel ups the ante in almost every way. The grim style is accompanied by some of the tightest 2D action around. While the challenge and dark subject matter could be a turn-off for some, most players will find a deep and rewarding action title that is more than worth a download.
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gameshark.com review
Despite the intensity level, control is outstanding, and the player characters have several attacks at their disposal to balance the overwhelming odds. Each can equip up to four different melee weapons, two guns, and four different kinds of “dish magicâ€. Each weapon has different combos, reach, speed, and advantages, so the player has a lot of freedom in deciding how to dispatch the thousands of robots, zombies, puppets, commandos, and so forth that the game continually spews forth.
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eurogamer.it review
No Synopsis Available
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eurogamer.es review
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