Adult Swim Games have announced Samurai Jack: Battle through Time, a hack n' slash adventure based on the award-winning animated show by Genndy Tartakovsky. The game apparently takes place across the entire series and covers different eras of Jack's war against the ancient shapeshifting evil, Aku. The game is being developed by Japan-based Soleil Games, a studio that counts Team Ninja veterans among its ranks.
I'm both excited and a little confused by this announcement. I'm a huge fan of Samurai Jack, and I own both previous Jack games from way back when the show first came out: the action-adventure Shadow of Aku on the GameCube, and Amulet of Time, the underrated Metroidvania on the Game Boy Advance. So I'm definitely psyched to see a modern game that covers the whole series.
That said, the timing is a bit weird. Samurai Jack was cancelled back in 2004, but returned for a final season in 2017 after a 12 year hiatus. I enjoyed season 5 and a lot of its bold ideas, but felt that it was a bit rushed in how it wrapped things up. It's a little weird for Cartoon Network to make a game 2 years after the final season wrapped. At the end of the day however it's more Samurai Jack, something I didn't think I'd get after the show ended, and I felt that Jack never got the video game treatment he really deserved, so ultimately it's a win. I'm especially excited to see how Soleil Games handles this.
Samurai Jack: Battle through Time comes to PC and consoles this summer.
