One section on the third level is so deliberately moronic that it's guaranteed to kill you at least once. The pitsĮqually frustrating are the regular bottomless pits, often placed in utterly stupid positions and guaranteed to send you back to the beginning of the level, whether or not you have a Ninja Rebirth item equipped. It feels like you're wearing a neck brace, and it makes you wonder if the camera's designers had any idea how their creation would be put to use. Worst of these is the camera, which is supposed to be clever and dynamically react to show you what you want to see in a given situation - looking straight down when you reach the edge of a rooftop, for example - but instead virtually refuses to point in sensible directions, particularly when you're sidling or creeping around. To add more incentive to replay, K2 also offers several guard layouts for each mission, and lets you pick between fellow ninjas Rikimaru and Ayame (and the good doctor Tesshu, once you've unlocked him), each of whom has their own stealth kills and individual mannerisms.īut while stealth kills are entertaining and exhilarating enough to begin with, they are also very easy to do - so much so that before long the only real challenge is picking your moment and then surviving the quirks of design that rush to try and thwart your plans.
With each kill, a section of your stealth kill meter lights up, and filling it once per level gives you access to a new ability, like a fighting move that slams enemies against the wall, robbing the average grunt of most of his health, or Ninja Vision, which allows you to zoom in and get a better view of proceedings. It's worth trying to approach from riskier angles, too, because the grislier kills offer more reward. Jump from a building, for example, and you'll plunge your sword into an enemy's throat, but for a more intense takedown you can always climb onto his shoulders and drive a sword through his skull. Stealth killing is your main tool, and there are a number of different animations to see by attacking from different angles. Each level is like a big ninja playground in which you can climb around with your grappling hook, creep silently over rooftops, and observe your enemies until you're comfortable enough to start picking them off. Sandbox of deathĪnd therein, basically, lies the game. Fortunately the latter isn't very difficult to do, but you won't get the highest ranking for a level if you're spotted. Next to it a little counter ticks up and down between 0 and 100 depending on his alertness, and when it turns into a pair of fiery exclamation marks and you start hearing shouts, he's spotted you, and you'll either have to fight him off or run away and hide. Helping you on your way is a meter in the bottom left that represents the nearest guard's wariness as a growing exclamation mark. When you've sneaked right the way up to a blissfully ignorant sentry, the X button is used to administer a stealth kill, which the camera frames in gruesome close-up. By holding the left trigger while moving, your ninja hunches and creeps along, allowing him to evade detection, sidle along walls and peek round. AaaPlaying the game will come easily to any modern console owner - the left and right sticks are for movement and camera respectively, A jumps and double-jumps, Y uses items (with the D-pad for selection), while X, B and the triggers come into play in stealth and combat.Īlthough there is a varied combat system here, and an increasing number of attacking moves as you work your way through the game, it's generally best to avoid direct confrontation. And if you can't imagine our disappointment, here's roughly what it sounded like: "Oooo.
You can imagine our disappointment, then, when it turned out that Tenchu: Return From Darkness is little more than a slightly expanded version of Wrath of Heaven, which still suffers from all the same problems and seems to have aged worryingly fast in the intervening period to boot.
And with so many look-but-don't-touch stealth titles doing the rounds, all that painstaking murder sounded slightly cathartic, too. Yet, despite our initial misgivings, the thought that Return From Darkness might address Wrath of Heaven's technical failings was more than enough to tempt us back for another helping.
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Upon closer inspection though, it was hamstrung by technical problems that regularly conspired to derail our ninja fantasies in punishing and frustrating ways, and ultimately it fell some way short of achieving its full potential.
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When Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven was released on PS2 last year, it was hailed - third-person camera issues notwithstanding - as a gruesome and generally competent example of fleet-footed slaughter, and topped the charts.
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