The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is, on paper, my kind of game. It’s a side-scrolling, old-school styled 2D beat-em-up which pits you against all manner of baddies including the quintessential gaming cannon fodder, Zombies.

It’s concepts like this that are niche but will sell incredibly well to that niche that Xbox Live Arcade has thrived on delivering, and nothing is different here. This game, like Braid, was impressively built by one man – James Silva, who won a competition Microsoft held to get your home-brewed title onto Microsoft’s Live Arcade service for real.

James has a lot to answer for, and in the good way. What I’d like to ask him is how he managed to make his game so good with just one person behind the wheel, when other games that shall go unnamed have managed to suck the big one with ten or twenty people behind them. I’d also like to ask him why the game is so incredibly hard. I think I already know the answer to that one, though – its old school.

The 2D gameplay is complemented by the addition of a combo system more at home in 3D titles, allowing you to perform slick-looking and high-damage dealing moves by juggling your enemies mid-air, switching weapons between attacks and performing brutal finishing moves. Because of your violent attacks, the blood flows thick and fast, and Dead Samurai is quite possibly the most violent game on XBLA, even if it only is so in a cartoony way.

The action is frantic and fast and because of this the level design takes a bit of a back-seat to the combat. The level design traditionally travels from left to right, occasionally having you go back on yourself or up or down to unlock a door, but on the whole the concept of the level is more to get from one end to the other alive rather than spend hours working out how to get to the end.

Each level has a killer boss at the end just waiting to ruin you, and all this kind of stuff is reminiscent of the old NES, SNES and Mega Drive beat-em-ups except now it’s a whole lot prettier. XBLA vets may also notice the similarity to Alien Homind HD, with the crazy difficulty and fun hack and slash action, but thanks to the combo system this game has more depth than Behemoth’s offering.

The game has 14 story mode levels and a challenge mode to go through with leaderboards for comparing your times to friends, as is standard on XBLA. The game also has some basic co-op options, too. It’s not the most rich in content, but like those 8-level retro beat-em-ups, it’s also the kind of game you’re likely to play again and again.

The art style is pretty and easy on the eyes in spite of all the blood – it really looks better in motion – and the game generally oozes that feeling that a game made by a gamer gives off. It’s good stuff.

The controls are overly sensitive, it’s sometimes too hectic to follow, and yes it’s controller-smashing hard – but these things can all be forgiven because it’s some solid, short fun with deeper mechanics than one would first believe at first glance.

The fact it was made by one man sitting in his home makes it all the more impressive.

8 / 10