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Though innovative in design and featuring and eccentric story, Killer 7 ultimately fails to deliver a fulfilling experience.
The mechanics in the game are an interesting twist on the first/third person action genre. Movement is entirely on specific paths (rails) and is done simply by holding down one button. The game displays junctions by pausing the action and showing possible paths. You choose a path with the left thumbstick and play resumes. The game is played in third person for movement, but shifts to a first person view for combat. The various personas have different weapons and each has a primary and secondary firing mode, which are all standard fare for the genre. One important note is that moving and shooting are separate modes (a la Resident Evil) and are thus mutually exclusive.
The game starts out offering two difficulty settings: normal and hard, but it should have had three choices. On normal difficulty, the mini-map shows the location of every puzzle, the solution, and the persona required to complete it. I liked the combat difficulty on normal, but wish the developers would have removed all the solutions from the mini-map. Of course, you could go through the game without looking at the map, but that would be even more frustrating. The one thing missing is a player icon, so it can take a while to figure out where you actually are on the map, which is also frustrating.
Though the game features seven killers, you'll likely only use one, Dan Smith, for the vast majority of the game. The others are used for solving certain puzzles or defeating particular enemy types, but are otherwise useless in combat when compared to Dan's all-around power and speed. This seems like a serious lack of balance and makes the persona mechanic all but pointless.
Aesthetically, the game looks average, though the environments are mostly sterile and uninteresting. As movement is basically on rails, exploration and discovery are impossible, making the world look even more uninteresting as a result. The game starts out using in-engine cut scenes, but as soon as you pop in the second disk, all the cut scenes look like anime. The transition is somewhat jarring and I was left with a negative impression about the overall production values.
The story is convoluted at best and starts out as a completely nonsensical mess. Most of the plot development is slow and onerous. With seven unique killers, you would think there was enough material for interesting character development. Sadly, everything remains fairly vague and unexplained even after the credits have rolled and the game is over. Leaving a few loose ends or threads for a sequel is one thing, but the almost complete lack of real closure in many aspects of the story makes for a very disappointing end to what became a boring, repetitive gameplay experience. In fact, my hope that the story would come together in the end was the only reason I kept playing, so the disappointment was magnified when all was said and done.
From a technical standpoint, Killer 7 has one very serious issue. The game never has more than a few enemies on screen at once, very little in the way of graphical flashiness, and movement locked to specific rails. Why, then, the game is plagued with loading screens EVERYWHERE is a mystery. I heard that the PS2 version of the game is even worse, which seems unfathomable. The constant loading was a huge source of frustration.
Killer 7 is a novel experience for the first few levels, but devolves into a repetitive game that fails (or refuses) to deliver any meaningful conclusions in the end. Rent it, but don't bother finishing it after you've grown tired of the one-trick pony.
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