If you're at all familiar with KOEI's staple series, Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, and the way in which they have utterly failed to move the gameplay or visuals forward in any significant way through the myriad releases over the years, then it may be that you greeted the prospect of Samurai Warriors: Katana, the series' debut on the Nintendo Wii, with little more than a sigh of disinterest. I was still hopeful that the Wii's controls might be able to introduce a new spin on the very tired gameplay, so I loaded up the game with an open mind.

However, I was very disappointed, to start with at least, as Katana plonks you onto the menu after an extremely underwhelming intro. You are given the choice of leaping into the Campaign, indulging in some Versus action or taking part in a Tournament. Unfortunately, the Tournament mode isn't open to first-time players and the girl I live with couldn't be less interested in sword fighting games if she tried. Career it was, then.

The plot is pretty standard for a Samurai Warriors game; there's a lot of feuding warlords and a warrior whose destiny will shape the world. Or something. The translation is pretty terrible, so I found it quite hard to tell what was actually going on. It's very obvious that this game started life in Japan and has had the bare minimum of time and money spent on making it intelligible for a Western audience. This is especially true of the voice acting, which is absolutely terrible. It's not just the translation that's terrible - the voice actors seem to think that the best way to portray a slightly cowardly character, for example, is to have him screech through his lines as if he's a pantomime transvestite. Thankfully, in one of the most baffling displays of common sense I've seen in the gaming industry, you have the option to have the characters speak with their original Japanese voices. This improves things massively and whilst it's quite hard to understand the subtitles, they're not going to drive you into a murderous rage in the way the English voice dubs will.

Taking a departure from the usual third person hack and slash antics that the series is renowned for, the vast majority of Katana emulates the on-rails gameplay of arcade classics like House of the Dead, but with swords taking the place of guns. For those who haven't been rigorously exploited by coin-op arcade games, they play something like this. You play from a first person viewpoint and a barrage of enemies (usually twenty or so) run towards you and patiently wait for you to kill them. Occasionally one might actually attack you, but most of your enemies seem more intent on gazing into the depths of your blue, blue eyes and seeing the love that lies therein. Once they're all dead, the game moves you forward, through some uninspiring scenery, until you are presented with another group.

If this sounds samey then trust me when I say that it is. Whilst you do encounter ninjas, rival samurai and some entertaining bosses, the core gameplay of Katana consists of pointing at enemies with the Wiimote and clicking on them as quickly as possible. Normally I'd frown on statements like that because it sounds like a massive over simplification, but in Katana's case, it is pretty accurate. There is more to the game than pointing and clicking of course; there are occasional free-roaming segments and some threadbare RPG elements, but most of your time will be spent slumped on the sofa, pressing the A button as quickly as possible.

This highlights one of the biggest disappointments about this game - the controls. The A button is your basic attack, whilst slashing the Wiimote to the side or up and down performs special attacks. Unfortunately, special attacks are very difficult to chain together, so for the most part you'll be hammering on the A button until your thumb begins to bleed. The controls aren't especially bad - they're fairly responsive and there is a certain logic to them - but it would have been nice to see a little more imagination put into them. Katana is also far too arcadey for its own good; slashing your sword, for example, hurts everyone within a few feet of you - it doesn't matter if there are twenty enemies or just two. Also, each enemy can take far too much damage before they keel over. I haven't done much sword fighting in my time, but I've done enough to know that impaling someone's throat with 44 inches of folded steel tends to drop them on the first blow, yet here you have to impale even the most basic enemies at least four times before they bite the dust.

Developers don't seem to realise that sword fighting should follow the same basic rules of all other games. Normal enemies should die with one or two successful attacks, harder enemies should take four or five hits, bosses can take more. How come The Chronicles of Riddick and Assassin's Creed are the only games to get this right? Katana would be much, much better if it took itself a little more seriously. If you could only hit one enemy at a time but they were easier to kill then you would need slightly more skill to play, but it would be infinitely more rewarding.

The more astute of you may have noticed that I don't like this game very much. It may, therefore, come as a surprise when I say that Katana is quite good fun - occasionally. Once you get past the terrible voice acting, uninspiring controls and annoying gameplay, there's something to the game that makes it reasonably playable. Part of this is due to the Musou attacks - once you've killed a certain number of enemies, you can activate your Musou with a shake of the Nunchuk. You then wave the Wiimote like a demon and every enemy onscreen takes damage from every slash you make. This usually ends with about thirty enemies dying in the space of ten seconds, which is nicely satisfying.

Also, whilst we're looking at the positives, the graphics are okay. They're not especially good, but they're perfectly serviceable. The same can be said for the music; it's nice to see a developer spend just enough time on the music and graphics to prevent them from being an eyesore but not spending all their resources on creating fancy particle effects to the detriment of the actual gameplay.

So what are we left with? Samurai Warriors: Katana is not a good game by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not especially terrible. Almost every single area of the game could use improvement, but there is some fun to be had if you know where to look, and the change in viewpoint and gameplay to transform Samurai Warriors from a third person hack 'n' slash into a first person light-gun style game has been successful in some ways. I can't recommend buying it for more than a tenner, but if some elderly relative has given it to you as a gift then you should at least play it before trading it in. You might just find yourself enjoying it in a guilty pleasure kind of way.

Reviewed by Mike Morwood for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).