| mrstickball said: I guess the question is "why is it getting good, but not great scores"? It's got a 83.1 on Gamerankings with 7 reviews. Is it: 1) The game is not that great 2) The game does not evolve much beyond NGB/NGS 3) There are technical issues (such as the frame rate issues) 4) The reviewers suck at games, and pull a Famitsu and dock points for difficulty Take your pick. I can understand if it's #2, but don't see how one could justify a significantly lower score. Of course, Mario Kart Wii has around the same score, and we know how that one turned out. I guess developers are only scoring things on "OMGZ GROUND BREAKING MATERIALZ" and are leaving out any idea if the game is actually...Good. |
Looks like a combination of #1 and #3. Mostly just bad design decisions. Here are some quotes from a few reviews.
From 1UP:
The awful camera -- one of the worst I've dealt with in a 3D environment -- compounds those problems and unnecessarily complicates the combat. It drags along behind you like a wounded dog and wanders off on its own when you need it most. When fighting multiple enemies that are more than a sword's length away, it's a chore to constantly pull the right trigger (which forces the camera to face the same way as Ryu). When those enemies come armed with unblockable projectiles, it becomes damn annoying. And while you can look around from a first-person perspective, moving the camera in third-person is bizarrely locked into a binary system of viewpoints -- you can angle it up or down, but you can't focus on anything in between"
"It may be a game about combat, but it has more than its fair share of simple platforming and exploring. Both of those elements are done horribly, as hero Ryu Hayabusa is regularly at odds with his surroundings. It may be more focused structurally, but NG2 is the most linear action game I've played in recent memory. Invisible walls around every area maintain an awkward couple of feet between Ryu and physical interaction with the backgrounds, which -- while generally pretty -- feel artificially desolate until the bad guys appear out of nowhere. Even walking near ledges feels weird, as more invisible barriers hold you back until you jump through them. It's a world of "cans" and "can nots," and the missing gradation between them makes basic navigation feel a bit off.
From Eurogamer:
Where Ninja Gaiden balanced frustration with satisfaction, giving you a glow of accomplishment when you finally mastered a tricky section, NG2 breaks the equation on a regular basis. It spawns enemies on top of you - occasionally blinking them into existence right in front of your astonished face. It bombards you with unblockable, long-range attacks - and then restricts your movements, limiting your ability to dodge. It throws exploding kunai at you the second you walk through a door, from enemies you can't even see yet. It tantalises with the possibility of clever solutions or stealth (you are a bloody ninja, after all), allowing you to shoot out searchlights, and then instantly respawns the searchlights and bombards you with long-range rockets again.
These situations aren't something that you pass through by getting better at Ninja Gaiden 2. The game isn't challenging you to improve your skills or work out a cunning solution. It's just kicking your arse until you get lucky. Perhaps the AI will slip up and decide it can't see you, or it can't be bothered attacking you for a few seconds, or you'll score a somewhat random limb-removal against a tough foe and get to finish him off with the Y button.
Upon defeating the second boss (one of the game's cheapest, with lots of phases where you're expected to dodge bombardments of projectiles covering most of the play area), you get the final animation - sinking your scythe into its unprotected skull. For most of the game, this means the battle is over. In this specific battle, however, the boss explodes, and if you don't have enough health to survive it, or can't turn and block in time (which didn't seem to block all the damage anyway), you die and have to do the entire battle again.
Cheap? They'd turn their noses up at this in the game design Poundsaver, frankly. What makes it even worse is that there are tons of other bosses who explode at the end, but Ryu calmly walks away from those without any interaction from you.
Frame-rate is a persistent issue, and while a little slowdown can actually look quite cool in places, it's not so great when it prevents you from pulling off a move in combat or just makes the whole display laggy. This is especially noticeable if you're running in 1080p - we had to drop our 360's display back to 1080i to get the game to run at an acceptable frame-rate, and this on a brand new 360 running a boxed copy of the PAL release. There are other minor bugs, too. We occasionally got stuck on the legs of the larger boss creatures, and couldn't move around until the boss moved and we popped out.
NG2's camera is awful - really, speechlessly awful. It's manually controlled with the right thumb-stick, while the right trigger provides you with the ability to centre it behind you, but in a game this fast and intense, the fact that the camera has no intelligence of its own is as crippling to you as Ryu's limb-severing attacks are to his enemies. It'll happily sit there showing you the wall next to you while a boss pounds on you from off-screen, and it makes the game's otherwise-excellent platforming sections (a huge improvement on the previous game's, with definite cues from Prince of Persia) very painful at times. Worst of all, it's not just bad, it's buggy and bad; on several occasions it became stuck behind scenery and showed us a close-up of a wall while we got smashed into kibbles.
All of which is mainly depressing because Ninja Gaiden 2 is still a good game. It's beautiful, cinematic and full of fantastically detailed enemies, gorgeous animations and incredibly fast, exciting combat. But while it's good, it's not quite great. It's marred by technical problems and Team Ninja's previously perfect balancing act just isn't in evidence in major sections. There's too much trial-and-error gameplay, too many cheap shots, and not enough real challenge. There's a difference between kicking your arse until you learn from it, and kicking your arse until you get lucky, and Ninja Gaiden 2 fails that crucial test all too often.
