| Product: |
Ninja Gaiden (Xbox) |
| Date: |
12/06/04 (505 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: Amazing graphics, Challenging, Excellent gameplay
Disadvantages: Sometimes to challenging
Before i start, if you have no patience, do not by this game, i have no patience but luckily managed to matain sanity. Thios game ask alot of you, not only is a fairly big but you will get stuck and stuck and stuck till finally hurraay you defeated the big bad nasty thing with tentacles. This game is hard, but its worth the challenge if you like a challenge. If you played prince of persia sands of time and you thought it was a bit to easy and needed a more taxing challenge then this is a great game especially if you like RPG elements mixed around great action oprientated gameplay.
Now Ninja Gaiden is a great game do not get me wrong, it has amazing visuals, great gameplay, a mixture of elements, action, platform, adventure, its take the whole spectrum and crams them into what is an excellent action game. Based around a character alot of people know from the Dead or Alive beat em up series. This game is a 3D action adventure that sets the bench mark for modern games.
The nearest thing to this game that is some what similar is, well to be honest there a few, this game is very similar to Prince of Persia, its has links to the likes of Devil May Cry and Onimusha those sortsa of games. It really does take elements of games that have come before it and make it its own.
The story is quite a strange one involving mysterious magical swords, love, monsters oh yeah and a little doddery old man thats sells ya things, guess what yeah its kinda very much similiar to practically mosty of the games but ehy thats its games seem to take the same story and churn it into its own. I don't want to go into the story into detail buts its a pretty good one with most of the usuall aspects to it.
The gameplay is what matters with this game its excellent, you can interact with most of the scenary (by this i mean jump off it and use it to you advantage for attacks and such). Alot like prince of persia, you need to run along walls, perform what look li
ke spectacular stuns to reach a little petruding platform. So this game does seem to pinch a few ideas, but guess what this game is the game that these ideas where made for, its borrowed theses ideas and took them to a whole new level.
The figting is very simple to grasp, to execute could be a different matter depending on your skill. There are to attack buttons. x and y, these are like normal attack and heavy attack, you can string attacks together to creata devastating combo's which will kill quite alot of the games enemies, but there are the odd few that will take quite a big beating. Therea also a magic system refered to as Nimpo. By pressing Y+B together you use your nimpo techniques, you can only have one equipped at a time and there is only a few but they are goodies, and they can be extremely helpful when surround by hordes of beasties who are adamant they wanna bite your ankles. There is also ranged attack the b button controls these, they vary from shurikens to bow ancd arrows, and there different varieties ie explosive arrows, explosive shurikens and so on. Only some of these weapons can be quite weak they come in hadny at a number of points throuhgout the games. You can also block and roll in an exceptionallly similar fashion to prince of persia, you hold the left trigger and Ryu blocks, if you also press the left analouge stick he rolls away from danger, jumping is also nicely executed in this game depending on your angle of running and or what enemies are about the jumping varies, ie you will jump towards the nearest enemy which you can then add a attack to mash that nasty mand head in. Its works very well, but sometimes can get you into to bother and you will have to repeatedly hack at sections of this game.
The games adventurous side comes in the form off item collecting puzzle solving, items shops, you no the score its all very basic but its there. Money is the game is none exsistent instead like prince of persia, defeat ene
mies kick out esssense, like a energy that can be absorbed. If you abosrb it normal ie just walk past it it will either heal you (blue essense), recover you nimpo (red) or it can be used to buy things (yellow). You can also absorb this essence into you wepaon by holding y its called the ultimate technique, this is like a charge attack that suck in all the essence around you and usesit to unleash a devastating attack, if you absorb small essence into your weapon you do a sort of lunging strike, abosrb bigger amounts and its a devastating combo thats look brilliant and is very satisfying. Also the neat thing about this is, if you use these absorbing attack they act like essence breeders in effect, you suck in the engery attackm and you get more essence out of whatever you kill with that ultimate attack. But the fighting can not be realised until you paly this game its great you coan string together huge combo's of over 50 hits with ease as long as there enough enemies and as long as you dn't just stand and slash, you can get away with this but occasionally some eneies will get at you if you dn't catch them with you weapon. which is another great thing you don't just fight one enemy at a time if you are reeling off a big combo and you weaponf is swung behing you and an enemy is stood there he'll get a beating along with his buddy infront of you.
The range of enemies in this game is brilliant, fron other nija's, to zombies, to ghost fish, big ugly red dragon like beasts who are quite dumb and cam be lured into banging there heads of walls, its a nioce little comedy touch when you see them nut the wall and fall over only to do the same thing again. Its things like this that make the game great, you can just hack and hack but you will probably fail, so theres always a strategy for each type of enemy. The bosses in this game are extremely amazing, the first being a normal guy, to some of them being huge, dinasour skeletons, to massively hug
e dragons, worms and much more. But you definately know about it when a boss is in town, its big, its bad and it'll kill ya if you stand about thinking mmm what can i do. You have to be quick, smart and also verocious at the same time.
The game uses save points like alot of games, and they are a number dotted around the landscape. Remeber where they are aswell as you may sometimes needs to go back and forth to the item shop say to stock up then save and so on. At the items store you can buy new wepaons, health elixirs and so on all the usually stuff you find in your day to day adventurer store. You can also upgrade certain weapons, there is quite a nice of choice of weapons in there from the standard sword to a huge axe, nunchucks and a sword which looks very similar to Clouds Buster Swors from FF7. The nunchucks are my fave wepon, (well the Vigoorian flaif) the nunchucks you see can unleash huge combo's that aren't the most powerful of attacks but its makes it great for fighting multiple targets. the vigoorian flaif work like the nunchuks but they are just more powerful. There is only 1 item shop in the whole game ARGH you must think, well not exactly, there a statues of the shop owner dotted around but somehow when you interact with these statues you can buy items, which is a little strange but hey, they could have just had the one shop, that would have been hard. Speaking of hard this game doesn't not have an easy mode, its Normal, Hard and Very hard, normal being very taxing at first. Once you have mastered the controls and combat system of this game its is a brilliantly challenging game that will task the most veteran of us gamers. If you are a bit of a newcomer to games or are used to slow pace i don't think this is for you.
Thats why i do warn people if you aren't a skilled gamer and have no patience, do not by this game, if you dont care and just want to play this game, as it is a great experience that any fan of th
is sort of game should try then go and buy it what harm can it do you. Nervous breakdown, perhaps, manic depression. Well i took the risk and thankfully it paid off, im now sitting through the game on hard, with the new costume you get for completeing the game and you also get your normal sword replaced by a light saber style one that makes the authentic noises of its Star Wars counter part its all fun and games till someone gets there head chopped off with a light saber.
This game is amazing, its probably the best action adventure on X-Box so far, and its quite possibly one of the best looking. Its purte acrcade action mixed with a lovely bit of console adventuring. Must have title for true gamers. Rent if first if you are unsure, you could find it extremely hard, and if so you will struggle and by god you will probably pull your hair out, i found myself almost doin so, I though that this was going to be the game to make me bald, but oh kniow that was me decided to get a baldy last night lol.
TRUELY amazing game! You must at least try it.
9.5/10
Summary:
|
|
