Review: SHINOBI: Art of Vengeance
An overstuffed and challenging action platformer with gorgeous hand drawn art
The new SHINOBI: Art of Vengeance is fun, but nowhere near as exciting to me as NINJA GAIDEN: Ragebound.
I’d say it feels like an Xbox Live Arcade game. It’s fun, but it feels overcomplicated and punishing in all the wrong ways to me.
The combat is actually pretty satisfying to pilot. The combos flow smoothly, and there’s lots of nice attacks you can unlock. But there’s simply far too many game mechanics for my taste.
- A combo system featuring light & heavy attacks
- Dodge roll
- Charge attack
- Double jump
- A diagonal dive attack
- A ground pound attack
- An unlockable parry mechanic
- Air dash
- Wall run, jump, and slide
- Grappling hook
- Glider
- Execution move
- Special moves (4 slots)
- Super moves (4 slots)
- Equipment (2 slots)
And there are so many other moves and combos you can buy in the store in-game. Learning to juggle all of these things is something I never quite got the hang of.
However, the encounter design frequently left me irritated. The game starts to litter the screen with extremely tanky enemies that overwhelm the screen with projectiles and unavoidable attacks. And “armor” becomes a huge part of the game: a regenerating type of health that resists most attacks. If you play the game right, you can get all the enemies prepped for a multi-assassination attack that clears the screen of enemies.
The platforming sections were my least favorite, and in my stubbornness, I actually finished the most Super Meat Boy ass part of the game. I can’t say that was a wise use of my time, but I did it anyway. I’m no stranger to challenging platforming (I love Celeste and N+, for example), but the mechanics felt unrefined and the checkpointing felt unusually obnoxious.
I played through the whole game on normal difficulty (the hardest difficulty). Perhaps I would’ve liked it more if I had lowered it, but again, I was feeling stubborn.
I don’t think the game is bad… but it’s not for me. I could even imagine someone liking this better than Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, given how it’s harder by default and absolutely stuffed to the gills with game mechanics. But for me it felt like an unfocused and disappointing second course after gorging myself on a full plate of perfect ninja game immediately before playing this one.
