Ninja Blade Review

It is fascinating as an artifact. Here is the studio that would define patient, punishing combat making a game with almost no patience in it, chasing the cinematic action template of its moment as hard as it can. Set pieces arrive constantly, a parasite the size of a building, a freefall down a skyscraper, a motorcycle chase, and every one of them is spectacular for the eight seconds before a button icon appears and the sequence resolves itself.

The underlying combat is competent, with three weapons and a slow motion focus mode, and there are stretches where it is a decent middleweight action game. It never trusts those stretches. The story is a briefing about a corporate conspiracy and infected Tokyo that exists to move you between spectacles, the checkpointing is inconsistent, and dying during a long prompt chain sends you back further than it should. Worth a look mostly for the strangeness of who made it.