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Starting life on XNA may not be the best place for a game, with recent sales trends showing that many XNA games are just not selling. Whether this is a reflection on the quality of titles is still a debate, there are some titles however that are real gems. One that fits in this category is The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. The potential really showed with this original XNA with it winning Microsoft’s Dream Build Play contest. Now the Dishwasher has been released for the XBLA it begs the question, how does it compare with the quality of its live arcade brethren?

The Dishwasher comes across a bit confusing having you play as a nobody who washed dishes and was one day killed. Somehow The Dishwasher came back to life as some form of ghoul and is now a samurai content with destroying anyone or anything that happens to get in the way. The story is told in a comic strip format and often appears after a mission is complete shedding some light on the mystery behind the game. The comic strip style works and looks great suiting the bleak art style of the game, it’s just a shame that by the games end its still a bit confusing as to what exactly happened throughout.

Like it or not the art style of The Dishwasher does give it an interesting visual appeal and for the most part looks great. It’s not the brightest game or the most colourful with the palate consisting of brown, grey, red and black with the occasional brighter colours of pink and blue coming from weapon fire. Whilst the change in colours looks awesome it doesn’t stack too well with the overall art style and does seem out of place in a game with such a dark colour palette.

The heart of The Dishwasher comes in its story mode offering that will keep you busy for a number of hours fighting through its many levels. Being a button masher The Dishwasher is almost guaranteed to give your fingers a real workout where the reward is gratuitous violence with enemies simply being hacked to pieces. Once an enemy has been hit a certain number of time you will have the option to finish them off with a clean or messy kill, naturally the messy kills involve a lot of blood but are generally no less clean than the clean kill.

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