Ninety-Nine Nights....total development time for this game maybe? Or sleeper hit? Find out right now in an honest review
Graphics: Beautiful in the cutscenes, but what is the deal with the jumpy frame rate? At times, things flow smoothly, but at others, you really can notice a pronounced framerate drop. Is there something about the 360 that makes fixing this difficult? I ask because I experienced similar issues with other games, i.e. Oblivion, GRAW, etc. I don't know. But at any rate, the visuals are very nice. It does get hard to tell the bad guys from the good guys in battle though. Thankfully, you can't harm your own troops. Which doesn't really matter in the scheme of things since they are better off dead, but I'll get to that later. Graphics = good.
Sound: I'm not going to say the voice acting is horrible, but you won't be writing home about it any time soon either. It gets the job done, and that's about all you can really say about it. Sound effects aren't horrible..but are just the typical "psh..psh..psh" sound we have all come to expect since these kind of games first came to be.
Control: Not so great. Once you start into a combo, it is very hard to direct it in any particular direction. Not to mention at the end of it, you are usually susceptible to being attacked from behind. The camera is a constant fight as well. My biggest issue, however, is in how slow your player runs. It takes way too long to get anywhere on the map. That's more of a gameplay issue, but I figured I'd mention it here. Oh...and don't even bother blocking.
Replay value: Next to none. Nobody wants to go through the frustrating mission design the first time, much less multiple times after...unless you are just a glutton for punishment.
Gameplay: Basically, its you against armies of orcs. Just keep mashing away on the X and Y buttons and you will plow through them. However, later in the game when the trolls start to appear, things get alot more difficult. For some reason, when you are slashing away on a troll, they don't even have an animation that they go into. Basically, you have to make sure you are actually hitting them, as they will be continuously attacking you while you are attacking them. The games BIGGEST failure by FAR, however, is it's unbelievably bad system to saving. If you die in a mission, you must do the entire thing over again. I'm docking this game 2 FULL POINTS for that reason alone, as it only goes to show that Microsoft wanted this game to take gamers awhile to beat until their big guns come out later in the year. I play this game until I die, and then it hits the shelf 9 times out of 10. Also, your troops are totally worthless. Get into a battle and watch them. They just stand there as if they've never seen an orc before. Um...help me FIGHT..idiots. Seriously, the A.I. is some of the worst I've seen...well...ever. I wouldn't even say it exists honestly. Your life bar starts off really short and one or two hits from a troll is enough to get it pretty low. I absolutely hated having to spend half hour on a mission only to die at the very end. There's just no fun to that. It's simply a very frustrating play.
All in all, I was quite let down with Ninety-Nine Nights. I don't get the feeling that there was alot of time or work put into the title, and I feel the end result really reflects that. I really wanted to like this game, but in the end, an abysmal save system and poor, poor story line serve to turn me off of it. As a rental, I could recommend since by now everyone is just looking for a game they haven't played yet. However, as a purchase..even at $49...I feel cheated. I'd pay $20..maybe...and at the very most. Unfortunately, N3 is little more than just another hack and slash game...and not one of the best either. The visuals are nice...but everything else just fails to impress.