Eduardo the Samurai Toaster Review (WiiWare)

Every once in a while a game comes along where just based on the title alone it seems like a homerun. Eduardo the Samurai Toaster is one of those games. Come on, you’re a toaster who’s a samurai. How could that not be cool? I can honestly say though, that after playing this game it does not live up to expectations.

When you first launch the game you are taken to a title screen where Eduardo sits patiently waiting for you to take control. You are then forced to walk through the credits with nothing to do other than look at the names on the screen and practice your pastry launching. You can skip a small portion of the credits by pausing the game and selecting a menu option, but you can not launch directly into the game. Once you reach the end of the credits you can then proceed to the actual gameplay. The Wii Remote is held sideways, NES style and you move the titular toaster with the D-Pad. The 2 button is used to fire pastries from your toaster body and the 1 button causes Eduardo to jump. You can fire the aforementioned pastries in any direction using the D-pad as well.

Things go downhill almost immediately once you enter the game. Eduardo the Samurai Toaster is a side scrolling platform shooter. It blends elements with a traditional platform game with elements of Gradius style shooters. There are a few problems with this formula. The first being the carpal tunnel inducing shooting. You cannot hold down the fire button like is common in most shooters. You are required to press the fire button everytime you want to shoot and every enemy takes multiple hits before they die. You also are not facing a small number of enemies, you will be facing dozens of enemies at a time. Randomly throughout levels you will also be forced to stop and fight a mini boss that is accompanied by more smaller enemies as well so you will find yourself constantly firing with very few, if any, breaks along the way.

The level design itself is also very uninspiring. Platforms are placed very randomly throughout the levels, and there’s no cohesiveness between the levels. About halfway through the game you are unexpliciably removed from the Gameplay you’ve gotten used to and thrown into a traditional shooter. Eduardo is given a rocket pack and you take to the skies fighting the enemy pastries. It feels very out of place after spending so long on traditional platform levels.

The art design is very appealing at first, but becomes very repetitive, very quickly. Many of the levels use the same assets. They are all drawn very well, but after seeing the same platform dozens of times you wonder what happened to the creativity. Everything seems like a cookie cutter was used and levels were pressed out, mixed around the thrown together. The music, what little there is, seems equally uninspired and quite forgettable.

Eduardo the Samurai Toaster is a game that can be as difficult or as easy as you want it to be. The designers give you the option to change the number of lives you are allowed at the beginning of your play session. They also gave the ability for infinite lives. If you run out of health you press the 1 button and are deposited in the same spot where you died and continue on. If you do not use this option it is almost impossible to finish due to the sheer volume of enemy encounters, but with infinite lives it seems to easy to progress. There really is no happy medium. I was able to play through the entire game in one sitting. There is the ability to have up to four people playing together and each assume the role of unnamed, to my knowledge, toasters who have the exact same abilities as Eduardo. The game does become a bit more fun with multiple players due to them taking some of the buttong pressing load from you. The difficulty does not scale with the number of players so you’re shooting fewer enemies when more players are involved.

Initial impressions were of a decent game with a catchy title and clever art design. This was quickly stripped away by the repetitive levels, and painful controls. It’s very hard to recommend this title to anyone of any age because you will find yourself becoming uninterested in the game after two or three levels. There is no score kept, no online leaderboards to compare with your friends, and no story to tie everything together. Those are things that have become almost a must have with this style of game. IN the end it’s not a game that many will find fun, unless the prospect of repetitive injuries is appealing to you.

Final Score: 2/5