Killer7 [GC]

It's wacky. Yes. Just don't make the mistake of thinking of the different personalities as radically different characters. It's easier to understand Killer 7 if you classify Harman's different personalities as different weapons, which happen to boast some rather disturbing visuals. In any shooting game you have to switch through weapons, right? The only difference here is that it changes the way the character looks and applies a few other minor pluses and minuses. The bleeding girl isn't exactly a machinegun, but you get the idea. There's a tool for every situation and the tools are made to look human.

In terms of layout, Killer 7 is a sort of straightforward survival horror-ish adventure with a few puzzles and a lot of what amounts to on-rails shooting. Players steer their characters around linear environments using a single button for acceleration. Every level we saw had the player walking in a relatively straight line and then choosing a path when he reached a door or intersection. At those points a fabulously artistic and broken glass indicator would popup. From what we know, the whole game is pieced together by these shards, as it were. Each shard represents a room. If you can imagine walking down a corridor and receiving a visual cue before you stepped into a room, you can imagine this.

Once Harman reaches an enemy the player can switch to a first-person mode and begin shooting or knifing or bleeding on them. Please stop trying to understand the bleeding girl. The proposed trick to combat is hitting the bad guys in specific weak spots to bring them down faster. Killing Heaven Smiles grants Harman blood to improve any of his personalities. In addition to dropping foes faster, hitting the Smiles in their sweet spots also causes the amount of collectible blood to increase, making for easier upgrades.

That's how it's supposed to work, but we noticed a slight hiccup we brought to Capcom's attention. Enemies, you see, respawn indefinitely. It's then possible to walk in and out of a room shooting and shooting at them (since you have unlimited ammunition).This makes the sweet spots totally unnecessary. Why try and aim for the hard point when you can just blindly wander out firing and then walk back and forth through rooms causing reloads? Since the blood level is capped on each mission, you need not worry about striving to attain the most from precise aiming.

In addition to all this shooting, Killer 7 is populated by what appear to be spins on familiar adventure puzzles. Some require the player to utilize one of his specific personalities to bypass a certain area or use an item at a specific place. Around every puzzle lingers Random Ghost Dude. If you get stuck, you can use him and he'll walk you through it all, but he'll flip you off for the trouble. He and bleeding girl must be friends.

Let's recap: