And yeah, it's the Gamecube version, part of the once-infamous Capcom Five, five games that were initially announced as Awesome Nintendo Gamecube Exclusives in 2002 or so. Of those five, only four were actually released and three of those went to the PS2 anyway. C'est la vie.

I probably don't need to tell anybody this, but Killer 7, yes, is totally weird. I mean, it's a weird that makes its own internal sense, I think... so it's not, like, WarioWare weird. You're an assassin-for-hire who manifests seven different personalities. Each persona has his or her own special powers and abilities, so throughout the game you're regularly switching between them all to forge through certain puzzles and fight scenes. I'm not sure if there's any point to the seven characters being multiple personalities, other than just being creepy. But a lot of the game is like that.

I'm digging the game's unique visuals, which are done in a flat, monochromatic style... as if Bruce Timm - the guy responsible for the 90's Batman animated series, among others - was told to include even more angles and even less color. The sound is obnoxious, yet another game to shluff off actual audio work in favor of garbled noise. There is some interesting story at work here (lots of ghosts talking about their misbegotten lives, for example), so it seems like a missed opportunity to create drama with real voice acting.

As promised, the controls are incredibly weird. Typically, the game uses stationary cameras with fun cinematic cameras (just like Resident Evil, back in the olden tymes). But it does not use the classic RE-style "human tank" controls. Instead, your path is entirely on-rails... you hold down the A button to run and use the B button to turn around. After every other game in the world using the analog stick to control your character's movement, this is a very off-putting thing to grasp. You only use the stick for choosing a path when you come across a path junction. Very strange.

You can tell that RE producer Shinji Mikami was involved, because the on-rails setup feels like an evolution of the RE tank scheme. Instead of wandering around each room searching for crap to click on, the rails just point you towards whatever you need to see. Killer 7 is the middle ground between the fast action of Resident Evil 4 and the dramatic camera angles of every RE before that.

When you went to shoot things, holding down the shoulder button switches to a first-person POV. So you get to use the analog stick again. There is additional weirdness afoot, however, as you have to use the other shoulder button to scan the area and make the baddies (which are sort of zombie-like) visible. I could do without that; it feels like something that was tacked on to make the game more difficult. "Gee, Bob, it sure is easy killing all these zombie things that walk towards you." "Yeah, how about we make them invisible?"

I do like having to reload by flicking the C stick. There's something tangibly cool about that.

I don't know how many missions there are in the game, but I'm on the fourth one. So far, it has easily been worth the fifteen bucks.