This is a game straight out of a 12-year-old boy’s ‘most awesome game idea ever’ notepad. It’s about vampire ninja/samurai assassins (one of whom has a chainsaw/gun arm) battling evil cyborg zombies on the moon. The premise is absurd, the screen is almost always caked in gore, and the soundtrack is pure grungy guitar all the time. But is it good enough to be worth your $10/800 MS Points?

Sequel to 2009′s The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, Vampire Smile is best described as a low-fi indie (Ska Software is ostensibly a one-man outfit) 2D re-envisioning of modern 3D ‘character action’ fighting games such as Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden. The flow of gameplay is pure and simple; you wander into a room, the doors slam shut, a small army of enemies attempt to murder you and your goal is to splatter them across the walls, floor, ceiling and even the fourth wall itself. Fans of the modern Ninja Gaiden updates, especially NG2, will find themselves very much at home here. A lot of the feel and cadence of the combat carries over directly, and even some go-to moves. If you’ve got the perfect Izuna Drop burnt into your muscle memory then it’ll serve you well here.

As you’ve probably picked up from the screenshots, Vampire Smile has a very sketchy, rough inky/charcoal art style. A near-monochrome palette with highlights of primary colours, usually red. While certainly divisive and likely to put off some people, it’s a perfect match for the homegrown aesthetic of the whole game. Sketchy art, grungy garage guitar wrangling, and a demented storyline straight out of someone’s fevered dreams and put straight down onto note paper. It isn’t a AAA game – it’s a personal sketchbook full of demented doodlings and swirling combat fantasies given grim life. Despite what initially seems to be an unrelenting wave of Grimdark Megagoth Hyperangst, the game also has a strong sense of humor, gleefully skewering itself on an ever-present wall of self-awareness at every opportunity. An undead vengeance-seeking samurai has potential to be a rather grim protagonist, but when he’s battling smiley-faced robots by spraying them with a squirt-gun then bashing them with a perpetually powered toaster, you can’t help but laugh.

Painting the moon red; Men In Black bleed the same as everyone else.

While the art itself is relatively simplistic, the screen-warping effects and particle sprays have an unmistakable next-gen flair to them, with swords leaving a rippling trail in their wake, blood arcing through the air and explosions accompanied by a copious bit of heat-haze. It’s not for everyone, but I personally think the style works in general. My only real gripes are the understandably limited number of animation frames on characters (mitigated somewhat by segmented body-parts tweening smoothly), and the fact that with enough characters in close proximity, the otherwise-impressive effects can sometimes blur them into a heaving mass of monochrome death. This (paradoxically enough) can be simultaneously escaped and worsened by the spectacular and satisfying one-button finishing moves that pop up when an enemy reaches low health. The camera tends to pull in closer and the view distort further as your tear your opponent apart. Impressive, if a little confusing to look at.

Juggling zombies on the moon! We all float up here.

Gameplay is pure, simple and intuitive fare. The left stick moves your character around, the right stick either dodges or teleports around freely (depending on character/weapon equipped), and the face buttons are mapped to jump and the holy trinity of light, heavy and grab attacks. The left trigger is used to call on smartbomb-like magic attacks, and the right trigger uses your secondary ranged weapons such as machineguns and shotguns. The LB and RB buttons cycle through your arsenal of melee weapons, too. There is no blocking, just evasion. Every single enemy attack is well telegraphed, giving you a chance to roll/warp out of trouble and immediately follow it up with a punishing counter. There’s not a huge number of enemy types, but there’s a respectable variety of humans, cyborgs, zombies, floating drones and a couple of ‘heavy hitter’ type brutes to tussle with.

Don't underestimate the range on these flamethrower cyborg's weapons.

Bosses in particular are quite impressive and varied. Some of them really mixing up the gameplay a bit, and forcing you to adopt new, one-off tactics for that fight. Other bosses return semi-regularly as normal enemies. My only complaints with the enemies are that most of the human and zombie-type foes tend to blur into one another once you’re sufficiently skilled, as certain attacks can just demolish them instantly, whether they’re a shambling corpse, a teleporting ninja or a gun-toting commando. Most of them can be exploded into a pile of meaty chunks with a single point-blank hit from the intensely satisfying shotgun. Whether this is a positive or negative depends on how much you enjoy exploding enemies with shotguns. That, and a couple of the bosses tended to drag on a little too long due to their inability to hold still and take a beating nicely (I’m looking at you, Skulltank), but perhaps I was just missing some obvious trick to beating them, so take that criticism with a pinch of salt.

A giant boss zombie that vomits smaller zombies at you. Top marks for creativity!

While newcomers may find themselves dying fairly regularly (fortunately there’s a wide range of difficulty settings, including the jokingly easy Pretty Princess Mode where it’s nearly impossible to die, and enemies bleed cartoon hearts and rainbows), there’s very little here that’s cheap or unfair. A good player will be able to cut through legions of enemies without taking a hit. The player in general has a huge advantage over almost every foe in terms of agility and power, but it requires player skill and practice to leverage this properly. While never hugely deep, there’s definitely enough subtleties to be learnt here, especially considering that each weapon for each character has a full move-set of its own letting you even switch combat styles mid-combo.

Compared to the original, Vampire Smile is just what a sequel should be. It’s more polished, more varied and more over-the-top. With two playable characters (the original Dishwasher, and his estranged and recently undead sister Yuki), each of them with their own set of weapons and playstyle, there’s more to get your teeth into here. The amount of content is roughly on par with the original game, offering a 12-13 (depending on which character you choose) stage Story Mode which should take about 3 hours per character/difficulty, a 50-stage Arcade mode, and an infinite survival mode. Aside from survival, all of these can be played in both local and online co-op, should you wish. In Local co-op, the camera zooms out quite some distance to allow for the two players to move freely, although things can get even more messy and confused up close.

Friendly fire! Fighting this enormous spider-cyborg in this tight hallway is fun.

The story mode is where the real meat of the game is. The focus here is undeniably on series newcomer Yuki, who died in the first game but (as with any good comic setting) got better. She has since been tried and found guilty of the rather hefty crime of blowing up the Earth, and is currently languishing in a prison cell orbiting the moon. Throughout her story, she’s assailed by some remarkably spooky and atmospheric nightmares/hallucinations (which are used to very clever effect during some notable encounters), and the reason behind her mental instability and apparent resurrection are the focus of the plot. If you choose to play as The Dishwasher, you’ll play through largely the same content, but with slightly less focus on plot. While fully fleshed out as a combat character, the storytelling is definitely weighted in favour of Yuki. Nicely, even co-op mode makes some brief attempt to address why the characters are teaming up instead of going their usual solo paths.

Most of the story is told via brief, gritty comic vignettes between levels.

As mentioned, a single playthrough should take around the 3 hour mark, but much like the 3D brawlers this is inspired by, it’s designed for replay value. The higher difficulty settings effectively remix the whole game, changing enemy placements and types to fit a more experienced player. While the environments may stay the same, the challenges on the higher settings are all new. With two modes above Normal and two playable characters, there’s a lot to get your teeth into just as far as story content goes. The Arcade mode only has one difficulty level, but it’s a  long and steadily toughening progression of battles, occasionally throwing you additional problems such as constantly draining health that can be restored by killing, or a level where only aerial combos deal damage. If you want to see all that’s on offer, Vampire Smile offers at least a solid 15-20 hours of play.

At the end of the day, this is an easy recommendation for fans of modern action games, and a must-have for fans of the original. There’s a lot to enjoy here for one or two players, and you get a lot of gameplay for your $10. It’s clearly not a AAA, high-budget production, but that’s half the joy of it. This is a game made by one guy. All the art, the music, the writing and the gameplay all bear his personal mark and unmistakable style, even if it isn’t quite as polished as some other XBLA offerings. It’s as indie as you can get, and a thunderously loud, chaotic messy hack n’ slash romp.