Has some good,true ninja action,but some problems too.
The game encourages you to use stealth(which ninja are supposed to do).You can perform some awesome and gruesome stealth kills.
The movements of your character during combat feels a bit stiff though.Your character can learn attack skills(which a slower,powerful attacks,or faster,weaker attacks)and upgrade some attack skills more than once,but often just pressing square constantly is the most effective way to defeat enemies.When you're surrounded by enemies,the stiff combat and the annoying camera angles will cause you to get hit by enemy attacks.
There is 50 missions in the game.Some of them can be completed very quickly,while others will take a bit more time.
The mission types are:-
Assassination missions,and I like them because you can stab your target through a screen without them suspecting anything.
Searching for items,which was okay sometimes for mission variety and to encourage you to explore many rooms and buildings,but sometimes they became boring and frustrating,especially when it's easy to overlook a book or small object that's in a room and you have many rooms to search.
There's missions where you'll need to kill every enemy in an environment,and sometimes it was frustrating when you had to search aimlessly for the last enemy that could be anywhere within a large environment.
There's easy missions where you'll need to make it from point A to point B alive.
There's also a mission where you have to follow someone without being detected,and if you get detected just once or lose the person you're following,it's automatic mission failure,and you'll have to start it from the beginning of the mission again,and there's also enemies in the area,which makes the mission challenging.
What makes the gameplay fun is you can go across rooftops,and use the grappler to pull youself to higher areas and some buildings a very tall.You can be creative in how you want to complete a mission and you can find hidden rooms/environments,and you can swim through rivers as an easier way to move through an area undetected.Some of the environments are quite big and there's a lot to explore.It's fun when you're trying to move through places undetected and being able to perform stealth kill and it's fun to stab enemies through a shadow screen.
Enemies can hear fast footsteps,so you'll need to walk slowly in some places.
There is boss fights,but I think they are terrible,and the skills I've used against the bosses are useless and the stiff controls makes your character be vulnerable against the bosses attacks,but you can just stock up on health potions,and press square constantly to defeat the boss,or simply knock the boss in water,and they will drown,in fact any enemy who gets knocked into water will die,because none of the enemies can swim.
The graphics do a good job of showing the traditional Japanese culture,they don't try to be too colorful or fancy.
There's a nice use of Japanese style homes and big Japanese castles.
When you perform a stealth kill,you'll see blood spraying out of the victim's neck or you can watch your character slit the throat of an enemy or sneak up behind them and impale them.
The cinematics are great and look like a real movie,Some of the cutscenes are ugly though.
The voice acting is done in Japanese,so you don't have to worry about horrible VO's and sub tittles are provided.
There's beautiful Japanese music that plays during the mission complete screens and during the missions you'll intense drum beats to provide an intenese atmosphere.When you complete the game,you'll hear a beautiful Japanese song done by a female singer with a beautiful voice.
The game has some good,true ninja action but stiff combat and other problems that stop it being as good as it could have been.