The level on the show floor opens with you as Garcian Smith – a slickly dressed assassin and one of Harmon Smith’s personalities. You’re carrying a briefcase towards an office building and are charged with the mission of destroying the Heaven’s Smile terrorist presence in the building and capturing the chief alive. In the course of the game, you’re aided along by a character dressed in a kind of red-and-blue S&M outfit. As you move along, Skippy (S&M Guy has an actual name, but it escapes me at the moment. He looks like a ‘Skippy’ though) helps explain all the weird crap you come across. And brother, you need it. Along the way, you can swap out personalities for certain effects like better firepower, pathfinding (the female personality, Kaede Smith can slit her wrists and the blood spray will reveal hidden passages. Yeah, my thoughts exactly.) Other valuable abilities involve Garcian being able to resurrect dead personalities, which will prove invaluable as you start off, given the…unorthodox nature of the control scheme.

The controls work like this: you hold down A to run forward, tap B to do a 180-degree turn when needed, and tilt the analog stick in the direction you want to go whenever you come to a fork in the road. Holding R brings out your gun, moving into a first-person shooter view. This is where it gets hectic. Apparently the Heaven’s Smile troops have some sort of inherent cloaking device that requires you to work the L trigger to scan and reveal them. After scanning, you hold down the B button to lock onto the enemy, then tap A to fire. Once you empty your magazine, you automatically leave first-person view to watch an FMV of your character reloading. Once the FMV plays out, you must repeat the process of returning to first-person mode, re-scan the enemy, re-lock on, then proceed firing. Imagine this, if you will. You’re playing Metroid Prime. To kill any enemy, big or small, you must first scan them with the Scan Visor. After that, you’re able to lock on and fire. However, the Power Beam – for this exercise – has limited ammo. Therefore, you reload, after which you must rescan the target with the Scan Visor, then lock on and fire.

I’ll be fair – I’m not bashing the game, I’m just trying to express the confusion I felt when I first played the game. My experience with shooters has nowhere near prepared me for what Killer 7 brought to the table. It’s not good, it’s not bad, not at this juncture. It’s merely different. I fully plan on getting a copy – either rental or outright purchase – and getting into it more deeply. When I do, rest assured you’ll find a complete review here on the Café.

Killer 7 is currently scheduled for a June 7th, 2005 release.

Mike Twomey