Killer Is Dead Stars an Assassin with an Outrageous Arm

It's been a long time since we learned anything about Grasshopper Manufacture's upcoming PlayStation 3 action title, Killer Is Dead. The game was announced in April last year, but has been kept under wraps for the past eight months. Thankfully, that's changed this week, courtesy of a Famitsu magazine exposé.

The report, translated by Polygon, explains that the title “picks up where Killer 7 and No More Heroes left off”, but stresses that it's not a direct sequel to either of those games. Instead, it merely belongs to the developer’s ‘assassin’ series, and features a unique cel-shaded art style as a result. As you can see from the screenshots embedded below, it looks absolutely amazing.

"We're trying to make a game that we'd only be able to make right now, at this point in time,” Suda51 said. “The result is seen in our unique high-contrast shading seen in the graphics, as well as the high speed wrestling-like action."

As previously mentioned, the title is set in the future, and stars a 35-year-old man named Mondo Zappa. The protagonist is augmented with various cybernetic enhancements, including a Swiss Army knife-esque left arm which can cycle between guns, drills, and other bits of gear. He uses the enhanced limb to absorb the blood of his victims, which charges special ‘Adrenalin Burst’ attacks.

"It's the story of a man who doesn't show himself much in the public world, but still worms his way into society and mercilessly eliminates the evil dispersed in it," Suda51 continued. "It's a personal story, not one that's conscious of the chaos going on in the real world at the moment, but you might get more than a taste of that in the end anyway.”

The game’s due out this summer in Japan, but is still yet to be announced for the west. We expect that to change over the coming weeks.