Deathsmiles – Review – Xbox 360

Have you ever played a game that lacked a story but was still fun to play; a game that you came back to when you had a break of about 15-30 minutes? Games like Geometry War or Texas Hold Em fit this bill. Death Smiles is a game that has a story but honestly it’s not great. It feels like it was second to gameplay. Is Death Smiles one of those games that completely lacks a story but is still fun to play and play in your spare time?

Story: The story is fairly basic. You get to play as one of four girls. Each girl encountered some scnerio in their life where they should have died but instead of dieing they were transported to this world called Gilverado. Gilverado is a world infested with monsters and demons that must be defeated. Each of the girls now possess magical power’s to defeat these monsters and demons. At the end of the game which is fairly short you can choose for them to stay in Gliverado with their friends or return them to the real world to their families.

Gameplay: The real meat of this game is the gameplay. Deathsmiles style of gameplay is called a Shoot ‘em up or “shmup” for short. In most shmup’s you are a space ship of some sort that has an arsenal that is ungodly but when you encounter enemies that arsenal seems now like a pea shooter. Instead of being a spaceship in this game you are a girl with magical powers. Nearly 100% of the time the screen is loaded with projectiles your goal is to dodge and destroy enemies kind of like Geometry Wars. I am relatively new to the shmup genre of games and I was quite excited to see that I could pick the difficulty level for each level I played. When you fire up the game you are presented with 6 editions of the game. The two main choices are the Normal game mode or the Mega Black Label mode. The only difference between is you can select a fifth girl to play with and you can turn on your power up earlier. In the game there are 6 main levels which you have to complete each and every time. You can also select a bonus level and depending on what version of the game you select at the main menu you can encounter two bonus levels. You can choose to play these bonus levels or not before you go to the final level and defeat the boss.

Graphics: If you have played 1942 -1945 in the arcade the graphics are on par with that. If you haven’t played those the game looks like an older gen arcade game. You can also determine how the graphics look in the pictures included in this review.

Multiplayer: Multiplayer is basically the same as single player except in the fact you will have another person playing with you. This can also be accomplished over Xbox Live.

Overall: You can pick up this game and play it anytime and fulfills the question presented at the top. It takes about 20 minutes to play through the whole game. It can get pretty intense depending on the level of difficulty you select. Overall this game is really fun but I feel it could have been featured on the Xbox Live Arcade.

Pros: A lot of fun.

Real intense.

Cons: No story.

Score: 8 out of 10

A reviewable disc was provided to the reviewer from the publisher for reviewing purposes.

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