Sony Computer Entertainment Genji: Days of the Blade

The details, designs and colours in Genji: Days of the Blade all create an immersive and cohesive environment that is pure eye candy.

Too bad it sticks to the basic hack-and-slash, one-against-hundreds conventions that both the Onimusha and Dynasty Warriors franchises have already played out.

As I said, Days is awesome to look at. The combat animations are superb and the character movements are fast and fluid. Speaking of which, there are four different characters to play as: series vets Yoshitsune and Benkei are joined by newcomers Shizuka and Buson. Each character fills a different stereotypical niche during battle: Yoshitsune, for example, is the well-balanced one, Benkei is the basic tank with enormous power and slow speed, Shizuka is the weak but effective ranged fighter and Buson is the turtle-like defensive character.

During gameplay, you may swap characters at will, which is important because the game requires you to use each character's skills to progress through a level.

It all sounds decent enough but then you run into a pretty big problem: the camera, which was, and still remains, the biggest technical complaint about the Genji series. Yes, the graphics in Days are beautiful, but when you're being picked off by off-screen enemies because the camera is fixed at a skewed angle to show off some interesting scenery, it's hard to appreciate the view. Another big gripe: the voice acting. As is usually the case, the English language track is absolutely horrendous and should be avoided at all costs. Do yourself a favor and turn on the vastly superior Japanese language track with English subtitles.