Review by: Meghan Watt

When I asked to play Deathsmiles, I was looking forward to a “so bad, it's good” type game – one of those arcade titles that you and your friends can shamelessly enjoy despite the lack of the highfalutin effects that go into your typical AAA game. Examining Deathsmiles from a distance, it seems to have the right combination of elements to make a perfectly delicious “bad game”: Anime preteens dressed in full goth Lolita fashion, poorly translated Japanese, a nonsensical plot and its core feature, bullet hell side-scrolling action. But where Deathsmiles succeeds in absurdities that will strike you dumb where you sit, it fails at providing a worthwhile bullet hell experience.

The term “bullet hell” describes the type of shoot-'em-up where the screen continuously scrolls as creatures pop out and shoot more bullets than you can reasonably dodge. Where many bullet hell games only allow you to shoot to the right, Deathsmiles allows you to horizontally shoot either left or right, and enemies above and below either laugh at you or suffer the wrath of your painfully slow targeted attack. And when too many bullets fill the screen, you can use one of your few screen-wiping bombs to eliminate all foes and their nasty projectiles. So, these sweet moves give Deathsmiles a one up over traditional bullet hell arcade games, right?

Sure, if you scratch upgradeable weaponry and playthroughs that last longer than 30 minutes. As you and a co-operative cohort take on unceasing wave of bullet-spewing monsters, you have the chance to pick up orbs that, once you reach a certain mark, allow you to trigger an extra powerful death ray. As the ultimate weapon, this beam of doom disintegrates bad guys until your rapidly decreasing orb counter hits zero. But despite the power boost, your weapon still only shoots horizontally. From the beginning of the game to end the end, you will never find a weapon upgrade that allows you to shoot anything else besides a sideways stream of bullets. No spinning twin laser, no multi-directional shotgun or wide-range flamethrower. Nope. Just one steady line of bullets that can, thankfully, at least grow in size and power.

But seeing as the game only takes about a half-hour to beat, you might not have time to notice the lack of variety. Deathsmiles provides four different characters as well as different game types that vary in speed and, strangely, the control scheme. But each game type still sports the same levels, same bad guys and same gameplay. When you ignore the backgrounds and final boss, each level plays out the same. So essentially, you're playing one level over and over again, just with different bullet patterns.

As bare-boned as Deathsmiles is, playing through the game a couple times is entertaining. The few lines of dialogue are pure comedy, the multiple endings are stunningly bizarre, the backgrounds are pretty and each level is full of enough ungovernable chaos to entertain you and a friend for an hour. It would make a great coin-op at a real-life arcade or as an Xbox Live Arcade download. Even then, you'd likely get more bang for your buck with a rental. As it is, the game is a whopping $50, and I can't possibly think of a reason to pay $50 for just an hour of entertainment. At least, not a reason I'm allowed to write.