Adrenaline Gaming Zone

Exclusive Preview: Ninja Blade (Xbox 360)

By Reeve. - April 7, 2009 - 07:47 UTC - 2 Comments

Ninja Blade release date is this Tuesday so it’s time for a little preview before we decide if it’s worth our 60 bucks.

Ninja Blade tells the story of Ken Ogawa, a young modern ninja trying to save Tokyo from a terrible invasion of yet-unknown creatures of many forms and abilities. Feels like a familiar story for some of us, but hopefully the entire game will have a decent story and interesting twists. Ninjas are cool, but let’s face it, we’ve seen almost everything. It’s a big challenge for From Software. I really expect Ken to have personality, to see some cool support characters or rivals and overall, to see someone actually cared about the script for this game.

Comparisons between this game and Ninja Gaiden are inevitable. Ninja blade seems to offer most of the thing we’ve experienced before; you get to wield different weapons, you have to defeat a considerable number of foes on screen to get to the next part of the level, you have the chance to upgrade your weapons and learn special techniques (called ninjutsus). Everything on that list sounds familiar right? Well, fortunately Ninja Blade has its own strong points to help it get over those comparisons; this game actually uses a lot of quick time events making the change of pace an important thing in this game, one moment you will be smashing buttons and the next you’ll calculate the right timing and sequence for each scene. For what we’ve seen so far, these events are definitely going to be a big part of action sequences and boss battles.

The game also offers beautiful scenes and cinemas, for monsters I mean. Moves are fast paced and well executed. Enemy AI is decent and boss battles are very impressing. There is a lot of blood everywhere, exactly as I expected. If they manage to keep an intense experience and the action flowing when they have to, while solving some old problems of its predecessors, like those annoying camera angles, we’ll have a pretty decent action game this week to help us forget that other ninja guy, at least for a moment.

Just a little more and we’ll get to experience the complete ninja adventure on this exclusive Xbox 360 game. Go download and play the demo, then let us know what you think. Adrenaline Gaming Zone will let you know more about this game later, stay tuned.

By Reeve