Fatalities and mutliplayer

That said, unlike most classics of the ‘beat up everyone you meet’ genre, The Dishwasher does feature a combo and fatality move system. Some of these are fatalities are funny (pulling off a robot’s leg and smacking it around the face like it’s a wet kipper in a comedy sketch), but most are arterially violent affairs involving the bisecting of flesh and nothing more.

Killing the green-eyed gimps is particularly satisfying, but these moves can’t help but expose flaws and irritations in the game. Fatality moves lock you into an animation sequence during which you can’t move, but you’re still vulnerable to attack. While killing an enemy with a fatality finisher yields health and other power ups, it takes vital seconds to be credited with these.

Graphically, the game looks rather good for something that’s the creation of one man, but the style doesn’t fit the action that well. It’s a combination of lovely, inky Okami-style characters and backdrops with giant ugly blocks for you to jump around on. The muted colour palette and blood splatters might look stylish, but with lots of enemies on screen at once the action can quickly get very confusing. This is particularly the case when combined with the clumsy use of foreground objects to add depth to the scene.


There are two main modes – story and arcade. Story is a progression through multiple levels with the aforementioned comic interludes to give you an idea of what’s going on, and you need to buy weapon upgrades using points gained from performing fatality finishes. Arcade levels are generally single screen width segments in which you need to kill a set number of enemies to advance. Your weapons are pre-determined for each level to add some complication to the challenge, which works well at first, but unless you really like The Dishwasher’s combat then the lack of context means it gets old soon. Disappointingly, it’s only arcade mode that’s available in multiplayer, so unlike Castle Crashers, which you can play for hours as you progress through the story, The Dishwasher is much more likely to be an instant action kind of title.

Conclusions

James Silva, The Dishwasher’s developer, sounds like a talented and committed guy, and contests to promote wider access to games development are a great idea, but you can hear people straining to like The Dishwasher more than they really do.

It’s admirable that it’s the work of one person, but what comes across playing it is that it’s what would kindly be called a ‘mix’ of ideas and, if you were more harshly disposed, a mess. The contest it won is meant to praise design and promote originality, but The Dishwasher lacks any kind of cohesive vision or design and is really a fairly conservative attempt to blend elements of Castle Crashers, Vieutiful Joe, God of War and Double Dragon.

All this would be fine if The Dishwasher was out-and-out fun, but while it's violent and playable in short bursts, flaws in the weighting of enemies and the pacing of the levels limit its appeal, as does the fact multiplayer is constrained to arcade mode. Brutally killing legions of enemies will always have an appeal, but most gamers will probably find their attention goes elsewhere as Castle Crashers is better, and the classic Streets of Rage 2 is half the price. Even better, Silva's own Zombie Smashers series is available for free on PC.

Score Guide