The gameplay for Kill.Switch resembles that of Capom’s old arcade title Cabal. In Cabal, your soldier would duck behind objects while flinging grenades and spraying fire downrange at anything that moved. Take that basic gameplay and put it in a 3D third-person title, and you’ve got Kill.Switch. Sure the graphics are a thousand times better than the now aged Cabal, and you’ve got a lot more weapons to choose from, and of course the levels are quite diverse, but in the end, the two titles aren’t all that different. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not, so long as you enjoy 100 percent run-and-gun gameplay that rarely requires you to do anything more than switch between weapons, remember to reload, and fling grenades at clusters of enemies too dumb to separate when they hear gunfire. When a developer names a level "Think Like a Gun" (level 2), you know what type of gameplay you’re in for.

Probably the biggest difference between Kill.Switch ’s gameplay and that of any other run-and-gun shooter is the Offensive Cover System (OCS). With OCS, you can duck down behind objects, while firing blindly over the top of them. Likewise, you can hug up against walls and blind fire around corners. But it’s not true blind fire, since you are still able to aim. To balance out the blind fire "aiming" issue, Namco’s weakened the accuracy of your weapons. The problem is that they seem to have over-balanced things, as it’s insanely difficult to hit anything when using OCS. It’s far simpler to just play a game of peek-a-boo with the game’s AI-impaired opposition. The AI is apparently designed to provide nothing more than target practice for your super soldier, and as such, they perform admirably as they walk directly into sprays of gunfire, or follow their obviously scripted "run for cover" routines.

Graphically, Kill.Switch is a good-looking game on both platforms, with some well-developed textures, shadows and lighting. The environments are visually appealing, with plenty of objects spread about to act as cover. Crumpled cars, burning barrels and other chunks of debris help enhance the feeling of a living breathing war-torn world. While the character models look good, the movement animations are a bit stiff, which tends to make every living thing in the game appear robotic.

In the audio department, the soundtrack is pretty middle-of-the-road, with nothing really remarkable. Not bad, not good, it’s just an audio backdrop to keep you racing through the levels. Sound effects, what few there are outside of gunfire and explosions, are equally standard. You won’t find anything original in the sound, but there’s nothing awful here either.

Now for the big letdown, replay value. While Kill.Switch is a heck of a lot of fun, there’s no replay within it. The levels, even at higher difficulty settings, don’t change enough to warrant another go, and there’s no multiplayer mode offered. With a complete lack of unlockables or bonus content, Kill.Switch will be quickly relegated to a shelf (or returned to the rental store) after you finish its 10 hours or so of gameplay. Better gamers could probably mop up the opposition in 5-7 hours.

While Kill.Switch succeeds in being a fast, furious and fun action title, its lack of replay keeps it from being a recommended purchase. Should you rent it? Absolutely. But it’s altogether too short to be a purchase. Let’s hope Namco puts together a sequel with longer levels, and a nice online multiplayer mode.

See more screens on the Kill.Switch media page