Good:
* Much more detailed enemies and graphics, including the ability of nearly every bad guy to be amputated/decapitated and or chopped in half.
* Bodies of most enemies stay around after death, giving you an increased feeling of carnage and destruction. Leave a trail of death to follow!
* Cool weapons
* Easy saving of games at Dragon Statues
* Massive Boobage unrealistic proportions and extra jiggliness
Bad:
* Some massive slowdown in certain levels when lots of enemies are onscreen. Game over screen visual effects styling is bad and often VERY slow framerate.
* No map. WTH? Some levels you need a map
* Almost completely WORTHLESS ninpo! The Inferno magic is about the only one that does anything (homes in on baddies). But being that many of the bosses are fire-based demons or flyers, magic is almost worthless. Piercing Void is absolutely useless as it requires you to target an enemy and by the time you launch he ball, the baddie has moved. Short-range on the wind magic equally useless.
* Some lackluster level designs, especially caves, tunnels, or building interiors. Several levels feel rehased, especially the Flying Fortress level.
* Added feeling of "cheapness", due to reliance on button mashing and cheap tricks by the level designers. Several areas of the game are maddeningly frustrating due to this kind of cheapness, whose idea of challenging you is to throw wave after wave of the same enemies at you, or put ranged attackers well out of your reach. Examples are the grenade launching soldiers that spam explosives at you from afar or archers, usually appearing in pairs. Exploding jellyfish/mines that respawn. There must be at least 30 of these each time you encounter them.
* The damn biting fish are all back, including the big grabby swimming ones and the airborne ghost piranhas.
* Stupid looking/ugly enemies, with lots of them having some skull motif. Many of the enemies' faces are modified versions of skulls. Stupidness includes wolves that hold katana in their mouths and chop you with them?!
* Having to kill bosses a second time. 1 guy you have to kill 4 times. I know this is a trademark of the NG series, but 4 times???
* Lack of replay value. NO UNLOCKABLES except a measly sound test option and new colored costumes when you begin the game again after beating it. No Sonia as a playable character, no Missions like in NG Sigma. Would be great to be able to play Sonia or Muramasa.
* Lots of dumb unrealistic mechanics like the ability to swim in lava! WTH??.. Invisible barriers everywhere, limiting your interaction with the environment and keeping you several feet away from touching what looks like accessible scenery. Another is the lava filled armadillo boss that comes out of the crashed air fortress.. this thing was the machine's power core??? Back to the cheapness of the design: this boss exploded after you beat it, causing instant death if you don't know what to do before hand. This boss is tough enough if you are playing it the first few times through and to have it explode and kill you is a cheap trick.
* Some bosses are VERY easy to kill with a fully upgraded Scythe
* Much uglier, sloppier items interface w/ blood splatter motif.
The predecessors Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden Sigma were much better in terms of gameplay balance.
Rent this first if you are a casual fan. Having owned and beaten all the variations of the first NG, I am highly disappointed by this game, especially the lack of extras. After seeing how many features Sigma packed onto the PS3 version, I expected those to carry over to NG 2. No chance. No way to view beaten cut scenes, no photo gallery, concept art, rotatable models, nothing!! It feels like a rushed product. No replay value at all. Perhaps they're going to double dip and release NG 2 Omega. Still a very good game, mind you, but just feels half-done.
Click Here For Most Helpful Customer Reviews >>
This game is HARD. And I am not talking Hard as in, your going to die a lot but once you get the hang of it your going to get better and do better.I am talking hard as in the game will stop at nothing to humiliate and demoralize you until you quit playing it.
Enemies can and will hit you from off screen and you won't even know they are there yet and or you will know they are there but you can not properly avoid them because you can't see them due to camera angles.
You can get incredibly good at your combat abilities and get a flow going, but no matter what you do, the enemies in this game will always be better at it than you.
Veterans of this game, whom are some of the best, die a lot playing this game.
On the easiest setting its a bit easier, but its still not that easy.
Getting all the achievements in this game is a near impossibility. Its doable, but your going to have to buckle down and be really patient with yourself, because its potentially mind breaking.
Now, having said all that, maybe thats your cup of tea. For me, its not so much the case anymore, I have work and family and I wan't my games to challenge me, but I don't want to repeat the same area 800 times in order to get to the next area I will be reloading 800 times. I just don't have time for that anymore.
The graphics are really very nice, and I feel that its the strongest area of the game.
I would recommend that you rent this maybe to try it out before you buy it, if your confident that you will like it and know your going to try to get the achievements, then you might as well go ahead and buy it, its gonna take a long time.
Best Deals for Ninja Gaiden II
After putting in over 400 hrs. on the original Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden Black I was looking forward to 2 and now my fix is here. Well I was initially a little disappointed and felt that they released the game too early but once I got to tweaking the camera, cinema playback and controller options it solved or eased alot of the problems I was encountering.I'll keep this short by giveing the good points and bad.
Bad points first. There are frame rate issues if you have the auto cinema feature turned on they can get really bad when a lot of people are on the screen attacking you at one time. If you turn it off you probably won't see a problem with frame rates again.
Second problem is the camera, this can be a problem but you can manually adjust or speed up the auto adjust rate in the options menu and this helps a lot.
Graphically speaking it's a little inconsistent. The particle effects are great but at the same time some of the backgrounds are pretty bland. It's kind of a mixed bag but due to some of the things they've done regarding retaining chopped body parts long after you've left a room in the game it takes a toll on memory usage and thus taxes the 360 quite a bit. Add that to the size of the environments, the number of characters on screen at once and this game pushes the 360 pretty hard.
The other problem though not really a problem, but more of an annoyance is that the enemies are a little on the cheap side this time so you are forced to be a little more creative.
Now for the good:
Believe it or not they have actually improved the gameplay. You start off now with a long list of moves as opposed to hardly any in the original. Countering has been refinded so that you can properly time it. Weapons are now very varied and don't overlap in terms of usage. Enemy AI is incredible you can actually notice the enemies adjusting to your attack patterns. Granted this makes things more difficult but ultimately more satisfying when you win. The level design has gotten rid of a lot of the platforming and focuses much more on the fighting aspect of the game. Secondary weapons are chargable and are actually useful, can anyone actually admit that they used the bow much in the first one?
The story is actually a little more coherent now and makes a bit of sense, though not much. Last but not least It's a great game but a new Missions mode and a little more refinement of the default settings would have made this a classic.
Honest reviews on Ninja Gaiden II
Though still not for the faint of thumbs, this game still provides the smooth and intuitive action and beauty of the first and its ancestors. The easiest difficulty is now much more accessible to the average gamer as well. A must have for the serious action/adventure gamer.Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Ninja Gaiden II
Once in a while, a game comes along that justifies lying about going to a meeting so you could take off early from work and head home to play; Ninja Gaiden 2 is one of these games, and this was exactly what I did. It wasn't a complete lie however; I did have a meeting, a meeting with Ryu Hayabusa.This game is bloody, the major selling point of the game and I absolutely love it. The bone-crunching, flesh-slicing action is intense and fast, and unlike anything in previous hack n slash games. Both graphics and audio are tip top, and the controls are smooth and responsive.
One function I particularly like is the convenient weapons and item menu that can be easily accessed in the middle of heavy combat. This is important, as enemies outnumber you 6 to 1, you will inevitably take some pounding and as your health drops to dangerous levels, you can immediately hit the D-pad to consume various herbal remedies to stay alive. Furthermore, you can switch weapons in the middle of a fight so if you've been clobbering some poor dude for half a minute with your Lunar Staff and want to finish him off by slicing his throat from ear to ear, you can do that by switching to your Dragon Sword.
Concerning the difficulty, the hand-to-hand combat is very fierce and gets a little overwhelming at times; typically enemies attack in waves and by the time you're done with half of them, not much of your health may be left. The good news is that dead enemies' souls help restore health. The AI is pretty smart and injured enemies adjust their AI from aggressive to sneaky and psychotic just waiting for you to turn your back and plunge that sword or talon through your chest. So remember don't expect an enemy with only one arm left to just happily sit there, finish off him.
Unlike a lot of other games, bodies of dead enemies don't disappear off the screen, so bodies, limbs and chunks of bloody meat litter all over the ground after you've been through a wave of attackers, this is nice effect.
Also, blocking in this game is like taking cover in Gears of War, you can't do without it. Yet, while blocking you can either execute a counter attack after the enemy has finished his moves or dash away to escape. So, there is a huge number of fighting techniques and tactics that you can experiment with. Other aspects of the game are pretty conventional and straight forward occasional save and heal points in the form of a dragon statue, a shop to purchase weapons and items, boss battles (which will REALLY test your wits and reflexes) etc. There isn't too much of a learning curve (which is good), all you need is to come to grips with the pace, various combos and pick out your favorite techniques.
This is one of the best games on the 360 ever, right up there with Gears and Devil May Cry; NG2 certainly edges Devil in the fighting department. For those into achievements, NG2 provides some 60 achievements, and what's fun is the ease of gaining achievements you can earn achievements just by discovering and executing new skills, but as expected they are valued at only 5 gamescore points each. By the time I completed the first level, I've gained 11 achievements.
I knocked one star off because of camera issues, although awkward angles can be easily fixed by hitting the right trigger. Also, frame rates aren't entirely smooth and tend to slow down at various points, but this isn't too big a problem. Some levels will come across as just plain and ugly, and it seems level designers were lazy in this respect.
Another problem is the 'cheapness' of the levels, as others have mentioned, for example frequent and unexplained explosions on certain levels drain away your health a clear indication that level designers were too damn lazy to think of challenges to test your skill.
But my biggest problem with NG2 is that you can't replay past missions, that is a real disappointment as mission replays are crucial to the replay value of the game.
Overall this is a great game, certainly an intense experience; as an above-average difficult game, you can feel satisfied that you'll fight many enemies and bosses many times before finishing the game, so getting your money's worth.
No comments:
Post a Comment