Despite having a title and concept that lets it stand out from the Wii’s mostly kid-friendly fare, Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers falls short in too many areas to make it a recommendable title. Oh, yes, there are zombies. And yes, there are slayers of said zombies, some of whom do indeed wear bikinis. But if you go into the game expecting anything beyond that concept — which loses its novelty after about an hour — you’re bound to be disappointed.

A pastiche of horror-themed action games and low-brow cheesecake titillation, Onechanbara lets players initially choose from two characters to take through story mode: Aya, the cowboy-hat- and scarf-wearing, katana-wielding assassin; and her sister Saki, the schoolgirl uniform-clad brawler and wrestler. Both sisters carry a curse known as the “Baneful Blood,” which, depending on how one interprets the mish-mash of a story, curses them to fight zombies. Or perhaps it causes zombies to rise from the grave in the first place. I never could get that cleared up.

Each of story mode’s eight levels begins with a wall of text narrated by your character of choice, and it usually consists of cryptic purple prose that I mostly wound up ignoring. Both sisters talk about the curse of the Baneful Blood and bemoan the burden of fighting hordes of the undead, but it hardly amounts to what one could call a story.

The gameplay is equally shallow. Of course, gameplay involves killing lots and lots of zombies, but that’s literally all there is to do in the entire game. There’s no platforming, no puzzles to solve, no locked doors with hidden keys to find — absolutely nothing else to do but kill wave after wave of zombies on your way to the end of each level.

This repetition wouldn’t be such a big deal, however, if the game managed to at least make it fun. But unfortunately, chopping up zombies becomes a mindless, tedious task before you’ve even reached the end of either sister’s admittedly brief story mode. Attacking consists of shaking the Wii-mote to swing a sword or, in Saki’s case, shaking the Nunchuk to execute grappling moves. Repeat ad infinitum. After shaking my hands furiously for about an hour, my wrists began to hurt, and I found myself longing for story mode to hurry up and end. Thankfully, my hopes were answered, as story mode only takes a couple hours to complete for each character.

Each character also gains experience at the end of each level, and you can pour points into areas such as skill and vitality, but I found that this made no noticeable difference on gameplay. Saki’s grappling moves can already kill a zombie in one blow at the start, so what good does it do to level up her strength?

The levels themselves also suffer from a lack of imagination. They mostly consist of tired, cliché locations such as “Subway Station” and “Forest,” and the layout is a series of nearly identical square hallways. And if that’s not bad enough, story mode for each character uses the exact same levels but switched up into a different order — or changed so that one character travels in the opposite direction of the other.

Completing story mode with Aya and Saki unlocks two new characters, Misery and Reiko, and it was here that I felt the only slight taste of variety that the game has to offer. The levels are still the same, but at least the characters handle differently. Misery has a large sword that can turn into a segmented whip-like weapon (think Ivy from the Soul Calibur series), and Reiko has guns.

Reiko is easily my favorite character, if only for the fact that she gave my poor aching wrists a chance to rest. Instead of having to shake the Wii-mote over and over, I could simply lock on to the nearest zombie and unleash a barrage of bullets from a submachine gun.

Apart from story mode, Onechanbara offers practice, survival and free play modes. Apart from allowing a second player to join on a splitscreen (so you and a friend can bask in the boredom together), each mode is practically identical to story mode. The only reward to be had is unlocking extra costumes for the four characters, but effectively having to replay story mode four times was not very alluring to me.

Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers is a budget game, and it shows its poor budget at every turn. From the repetitive gameplay to the unimaginative levels to the dearth of extra features, the game feels like it shortchanges you, even at its reduced price. This is especially disappointing, given the games out there with low price tags that nonetheless have gone on to be huge successes (Peggle and Katamari Damacy, just to name two). This game’s biggest problem is not its budget but an unwillingness to make the most out of what it had available.