Ninja Gaiden review

[Krug]

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/action/ninjagaiden/review.html

Ok now I'm glad I have an Xbox..

 

[CrusaderX]

Sweet. I played the heck out of the original NES game when I was in college, so it's good to see that Ryu is back.

 

[Zelgadas]

The demo is on the most recent issue of OXM, and it's darned fun. It's pretty easy to pull of cool-looking moves with Ryu. Running on walls is accomplished by simply jumping into them, for example, and button-mashing will generally produce some pretty impressive-looking combat moves. You start the demo with 3 different weapons. There's your basic sword, which is probably the most well-balanced weapon you get. There's this massive two-handed . . . thing . . . I guess it's a sword of some sort. It does huge amounts of damage, usually beheading enemy ninja after two or three hits. There's also the flail thingie, which basically looks like two kama joined by a chain. Kama-chucks, if you will. They're not particularly powerful, but it's rediculously easy to get 30-hit combos with them. After a while, you're just wailing on a dead body. At any rate, I'm mighty impressed so far. You can't save in the demo, and it's pretty difficult (even with Ryu being such a bad-ass). The first time I played through, I got to the nunchaku-weilding boss, and got may ass handed to me. The second time, I didn't even get that far. There's this room that keeps spitting ninja out at you for like five minutes, and I made the mistake of not killing them faster than they were spawned. Ryu may be a bad-ass, but even the faceless red ninja-mooks are far from being push-overs.

At any rate, my verdict thus far is that, judging from the demo, I'm going to buy and enjoy this game like a sweet, sweet piece of candy. Ninja candy. With swords. And kama-chucks.

[edited: too many instances of the word 'pretty']