[Mechanical R]

I was weary when deciding to play Ninja Gaiden 3. Having not actually finished #2 and also having broken a laptop in a fit of rage because of it. You can begin to see why I was a little nervous to pick up the pad. For mine and electrical goods safety.

Though something wasn’t entirely right with NG3, whilst it still remained quite hard, it seemed to be slipping a little in both visuals and the combat. Visuals wise, the game appeared to be very fuzzy around edges and blurry around fast moving characters, which in our case was Hayabusa. Perhaps the developers are taking a little less gory route this time as we'd cut through 10 people and they still kept all their limbs. Blood a plenty however someone at the design office seemed to have toned things down a little this time. The almost crazy sense of style and comic approach to casual dismemberment and gore has almost gone.

The combat also seemed to take a bit of self accomplishment out by throwing the player into some long combos which were weren’t actually performing, this may have been due to attacking knocked out enemies, however mid through fighting the controls would be yanked from us to watch a long kill sequence totally removing flow and a sense of 'well, I didn’t really do any of that did I'.

It’s also possible by holding the Y button to charge up an attack caused by Hayabusas ‘cursed arm’ which will then complete a series of these finishing moves on a number of enemies depending on how long it was charged for. This 'easy way out button' again seemed to just leave us with either nothing to actually chop at ourselves or just wail on something already half dead.

This is Ninja Gaidens first game since the creator Tomonobu Itagaki had left the company, so it will be very interesting to see how Ninja Gaiden 3 will fair when it’s released next year.







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