Bikini girl-on-zombie fighting action that's neither fun nor funny.

At first, it's almost impossible not to find some sort of interest in Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad - it has the same sort of train wreck high concept draw as Snakes On A Plane. Sadly, unlike Snakes On A Plane, Onechanbara lacks any sort of fun or comedy to make it worthwhile.

From the very first moment, the game jumps straight to the point and notifies you exactly how little restraint or care the developers show. The narrative launches straight into an apartment, where a young girl watches a news report about the third such threat from monsters and zombies - lacking any sort of information on why it happens or the past thereof. After about thirty seconds, the game jumps straight into an inexplicable shower scene that only serves to make the game awkward and uncomfortable at best. This serves as the pinnacle of storytelling within Onechanbara.

Thematic elements aside, the gameplay is atrocious. While the simplistic control scheme sounds like a good idea on the surface, it fails when put into a very specific and unnecessarily difficult to adapt to combo system. Instead of most other games in the genre, Onechanbara is more than happy to lock everything into two buttons and require near frame-specific timing with slight variations for different combos. As the game gives very little clue as to how to perform combos in-game, visiting the practice mode to see and memorize the combo timings is a necessity.

Level design is equally uninspired, with pretty much every single scene having a structure of only long, narrow halls and wide open rooms. The game builds itself off of a bread and butter structure of walking forward an average of twenty paces, killing a load of zombies, and repeating for about ten-fifteen minutes. In one short scene, the developers thankfully give but a short reprieve from the dull action with a motorcycle-mounted level. Unsurprisingly, the motorcycle level can be finished without attacking a single enemy - all that's needed is to drive forward.

The one main deviation from the formula comes in a female soldier that is encountered and joins the party about a third of the way into the game. Her specialty is guns, which is both good and bad - it's far easier to kill the zombies from afar, but there are a few enemy types that cannot be harmed by anything other than a sword. Her presence is almost completely wasted, as the gunplay adds almost nothing to the title. I would, however, not mind her team (the aptly named "Zombie Police Force") getting a game down the line - there's something to be said about an elite force dedicated entirely to hunting down zombies with heavy weaponry.

For me, Onechanbara represents one of the biggest disappointments I've felt in a game - it looks silly, action packed, and a little fun. Instead, it's just repetitive drivel with a bit of cheesecake.