Stealth: One word not in this Ninjas vocabulary

Ninja Gaiden II is actually a pretty easy game to review because all of its flaws and plus points stand out like big glowing beacons. It also doesnt hurt that its predecessor was widely considered to be one of the best games on the previous Xbox.

The game itself starts as it means to go on. It introduces us to an absolutely moronic story where people in tight leather do battle with other people in tight leather, often with boobs bigger than their heads. We are then thrown headlong into a battle with a dozen sword wielding ninjas, who suicide bomb you when you cut one of their arms off.

And this is in the first 5 minutes.

Ninja Gaiden II is a game that delights in battering you around the head until you cry for mercy. Just when you think the game couldn't get any harder, it forces you into a small room with twice as many people as you just killed with archers firing exploding arrows up your arse.

It is often mercilessly unfair, to the point that some of the levels have had their difficulty levels artificially increased by adding cheap enemies to choke points.

The thing is, though, that the game is just a delight to play, so you grit your teeth and battle through.

And that is the theme of the whole game.

Team Ninja have made a fighting engine that surpasses their previous efforts on the other Ninja Gaiden games. You swoop around balletically, cleaving limbs from bodies and relieving people of their heads. It is astoundingly good fun to play.

The problem is that they have draped this fighting engine in an absolutely p*** poor game.

Compared to the level of polish the first game had, this is an incredible disappointment. The story is terrible and makes no sense, the levels are bland and often repeat sections, the boss fights are pretty weak and the game is outrageously cheap at times. There is about half the content of the first game and the whole thing reeks of 'couldnt give a crap'.

This is most plainly seen by the disaster that saw Team Ninja release a patch for a known game breaking bug, only to actually cause another game breaking bug ten minutes later, the only cure being uninstalling the patch itself.

Features don't work, the game runs at a low resolution, the screen tears......but all the while, you are having fun in spite of this.

It is actually quite heartbreaking to think of what they could have done if the same effort had been put into the game as they put into the boob physics on the cut scenes, but as it stands, its a stupendously flawed game that is a lot of fun to play.

Pick it up from the second hand bins.