Killer 7

I did not care for this game. I am not saying it is entirely without merit, there may be people who enjoyed it, and I would not respect them any less because of that, but I didn't like it at all. It has a cool cell shaded art style, it has a cool premise, and an interesting mechanic, it also has a painfully dull and poorly designed tutorial. Well designed games, games like portal, have a tutorial that is seamlessly melded with the game play so it is fun to do. Games with a mediocre to average level of designed have a tutorial you have to play through in the first level, or simply have the choice of doing if you want. Poorly designed games, like this game, have a menu you can go to where game mechanics are explained to you in dull text rather than demonstrated. Bonus points if this vital information is only accessible from a single point on the map instead of being in your pause menu. More bonus points if the long list of short explanations are poorly organized and take a LOOOONG time to go through. But wait there's more! Its not just a just a series of short articles on game play you can read through at your own pace, there is an obnoxious guy in a gimp suit who reads them to you. It is impossible to read them faster, or to skip past the intro lines he says EVERY TIME you open an article. There are like 30 different articles explaining different aspects of the woefully unintuitive game play, by the time you have read them all you have heard this same introductory phrase several dozen times.
I like a good disjointed, unnerving, dream sequence style surrealism, and this game has some of that, the problem is it also has the most annoying aspects of traditional narrative devices to let you know a character is insane. Why is it assumed that all crazy people perceive all written text in a bare legible, irregularly kerned, mixed caps, font? Why is it assumed the mentally ill see the world through a jittery blinking camera view? Why is it assumed that when ones brain is not functioning normally it also effects the function of their electronic devices? Schizophrenia does not intermittent static on televisions and radios.
Maybe there are people who would not be bothered by these myriad faults. Maybe the game play on the first level is just boring and the later levels are more interesting. Maybe the crazy and disjointed control style grows on you after a while. . . but I doubt it.

Game play video

in a five star ranking system
I give this game 1.5