A fun and over-the-top action game that effectively combines various facets of multiple genre conventions into a novel adventure, but suffers severely from major bugs and console port deficiencies that cannot be avoided.
Positive:
- Perhaps surprisingly, the plot and story are actually a highlight of the ongoing ordeal in conjunction with the action, albeit lacking any form of realism. Although the writing evokes a familiar science fiction horror fantasy setting and a recognizable evolving premise, the inclusion of ninja, and by extension, samurai lore certainly generates a palpable uniqueness that proves to be original and, at certain junctures, innovative.
- Monster and enemy designs are positively creative and bizarre, applying grotesque physical characteristics to identifiable natural species, thus capturing their appearance in uncanny and in abominable results that are interesting, fearsome, and formidable. Enemies that are built to the scale of the playable character are deformed transformations based on the average human being, but bosses are gigantic, overgrown, imposing, mutant monstrosities, that are amusing to fight, and a marvel to witness.
- Fighting mechanics revolve around hacking and slashing in intense rapidity and in cohesive fluidity, with hits carrying a considerable weight and with an uptempo rush that are equally satisfying and exciting to execute, regardless of the weapon. The onscreen results are dramatic, energetic, and spectacular, promoting enough flamboyance to captivate players and audiences.
- Cinematics associated with cut scenes are splendidly flashy and extravagant, exhibiting a heightened flair that could be considered to be relatively rare in terms of style, material, substance, and appearance. As a result, watching the choreographed scenes, and beholding the grandiose exposition of events is a pleasurable and entertainment experience.
Neutral:
- The general audio design is buggy and defective. No matter how the settings are tweaked, the music, sound effects, and voice volumes are never right, with one or the other being too loud or too quiet. Enabling subtitles permits the player to understand what is being said by the characters, but the entire situation with the sounds overlapping each other and the volumes being erratic takes away from the audiovisual presentation.
- Quick time events, especially, and to a lesser extent, on rail shooting, are major aspects of the overall gameplay characteristics, often involving what culminates to being mildly interactive cut scenes interspersed between action and exploration sequences. While this design choice is not directly responsible for detracting from the broad enjoyment of the encompassing mechanics, it may or may not work for some players, depending on their tastes and on their expectations.
- Standard laws of physics are regularly defied and revised, with the playable character performing terrestrial and aerial maneuvers that are normally impossible. With that said, such unbelievable acrobatic feats add a zing of panache to the martial arts action, even if their outward appearance may not suit every player's expectations.
- Technical performance is decent, running at an ongoing 100 frames per second, but achieving this steadiness requires some adjustments, and some struggles implicating configurational trial and error, until the desirable results are attained. Some of the needed settings for this level of operation necessitates the user to deal with one of the game's pesky bugs with every initial software launch. On the other hand, all menus are restricted to about 22 frames per second, and this cannot be improved.
Negative:
- Installation and enablement of the old and deprecated .NET Framework 3.5, instead of the current .NET Framework 4.8 is mandatory. Whereas this does not pose an actual problem, it is an added hassle that could have been addressed and updated for modern systems.
- Certain menu activities generate a generic message that states, "Please don't turn off your console", while the software is running from a computer. In addition to all of the other technical flaws and issues, it is abundantly clear that the developers and publishers have made no effort to properly port the original console game to computers.
- Progress is only saved at the end of each mission, even though there are many checkpoints that are triggered as one proceeds through different areas. On average, missions take about one hour to complete, more or less, constraining the player to endure the possibility of prolonged playing sessions, in order to secure their place in the narrative, and to continue playing at a later time or date.
- Software stability is precarious and fickle, resulting in very frequent crashes, freezes, or lockups when skipping cut scenes or when attempting to quit the game. The suggested corrections by the community do not all work or address the major defects, as all of the workarounds seem to be highly dependent on the combination of operating system and hardware, producing an awfully unpredictable software environment. Worst of all, is that the aforementioned software collapses are so dire, that the only way to regain control of one's operating system is to restart the computer. The only way to avoid this fatal error is to not skip cut scenes, and to end the game's process manually to quit the game instead of quitting through its main menu selection.
- Many of the options available under the "PC Settings" section are not saved by the software, despite applying the changes before leaving the menu. These options must be manually reset according to one's needs each and every single time the game is started.
Overall rating: 3.0/5.0
