Review by: kevin.ip@utoronto.ca

Play Psychic Killer for even a few minutes, and it's a sure bet that any hardcore Sega fan will be thinking: "This could have been the greatest Shinobi game ever made. Too bad I'm wasting time with this brutally tedious game instead." On paper, this looked like an awesome game: Tremendous graphics, side-scrolling platform gameplay, Feudal Japan setting, bizarre & hideous enemy creatures mixed with armies of ninjas out for your blood. Anybody familiar with Sega's classic Shinobi series would have been right to drool in anticipation of this game, perhaps viewing it as the ninja game that would make up for the uninspired Shin Shinobi Den (Shinobi Legions) that "graced" the Saturn early in its life. What you get instead is a gorgeous but extremely fustrating game, closer in spirit to the Sega Genesis classic, Gunstar Heroes. However, despite being on a 32-bit machine, Psychic Killer utterly fails to match that title's fast-paced, fluid and exciting gameplay. Rather than implement the simple attacks used so effectively in Shinobi (that is, sword slash when the enemies are close, ninja stars or something similar when they are far away), the producers of PK opted to give your characters lightning blasts instead, along with a very annoying and tedious targetting system to control them.

Said system comes in the form of a ridiculous-looking kanji word floating around on the screen. It auto-targets onto enemies, whereupon hitting the C-button will unleash an attack on them. Hold down the button for a while and your character charges up, unleashing a bigger blast when the button is released. Sounds simple, but the problem is that moving your "kanji-target" to various enemies on the screen is a chore and difficult to do - not a welcome feature when you're simultaneously trying to keep your character from colliding with all the enemies! Sometimes it will remain on a target when you want it to move, and other times it will move because you twitched the control pad just slightly, giving an opening for the previously targetted enemy to remind you why good gameplay really DOES matter. Your character also sports a cool protective sphere manueover that seems to protect from projectiles and the like. However, it's not nearly enough to save this game from its terrible attack system.

Graphics are top notch. The backgrounds are all exquisitely detailed and TRUE 3D BACKGROUNDS. No, it's not just some neat 2D parallax effect. The buildings are all constructed of polygons and therefore create a very nice 3D effect as you move along. Some of the stages are quite spectacular, especially the boss stages. One has you on wooden raft, fighting a huge frog creature that is chasing you down a raging river. The effect is incredible.

Sound/Music are adequate and fitting, but not exceptional.

Psychic Killer is yet another example of graphics over gameplay, but in that especially reviled subcategory of graphics over _bad_ gameplay (as opposed to just boring gameplay). This is one time you'll find yourself wishing that the game developers had just rehashed "more of the same" gameplay (but made it an excellent example of that style), rather than trying to innovate. It's a shame that such graphical artistry went to waste on this terrible game.