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North America

Killer 7

by Daniel Bloodworth - May 19, 2005, 9:16 am EDT

“I’ve played through the whole game and I still don’t understand it." –Capcom representative

After years of showing no more than stylish video footage, Capcom has finally brought a playable build of Killer 7 to E3. I got some play time in the other day, and the game is simply bizarre.

The representative on hand repeatedly mentioned that the game is more focused on story, so the designers tried to make the gameplay as “minimalistic" as possible. What this translates into is a rather strange control scheme. Instead of using the control stick to move your character, you simply push the A button to walk forward, and your character moves through the environment on pre-routed paths. You turn around by pressing B, and when you come to a fork in the road, an NPC, or any object you might interact with, gameplay stops, and a menu comes up for you to select what to do next.

Enemies are invisible, so you’ll have to keep the sound up and your ears open. When an enemy comes near, you’ll hear it laugh. Even though you can see a faint shadow of the enemy’s form, bullets will have no effect unless you first scan it – a process that’s a bit awkward at first, as you’ll need to pull out your gun with R and then push L to scan. Once you see your foe, you can blast away with the A button, and aim for specific weak spots. Enemies can move very quickly, so reaction time and good aim are key to taking them down.

Killing an enemy results in streams of blood spurting in every direction, and you’ll collect the blood to turn into a serum that raises your characters’ stats. After you’ve killed a specific number of enemies, you’ll “wake up" new playable characters, who are multiple personalities of Mr. Smith. If a character happens to be killed, you’ll need to take Garcian Smith to the place they died to resurrect that personality, which is accomplished by tapping the A button repeatedly.

At this point, I’m not terribly thrilled about Killer 7. It seems rather awkward and unexciting at first, but Capcom representatives and others that have played more of the game say that the story is much more compelling beyond this first stage. I’ll keep an open mind and hope that’s true of the gameplay too as more characters and special abilities are enabled.

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Genre Shooter
Developer Capcom
Players1

Worldwide Releases

na: Killer 7
Release Jul 07, 2005
PublisherCapcom
RatingMature
jpn: Killer 7
Release Q4 2004
PublisherCapcom
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