If you’re a Japanese Xbox 360 owner, you have access to the Ninja Blade demo as of today.  Likewise, if you are a sneaky American Xbox 360 owner who was clever enough to create a Japanese account, you too can get your hands on a ten-minute trial of the newest Ninja Gaiden clone from publisher, Microsoft and developer, From Software.  I was lucky enough to have a few days left on my Japanese account, and downloaded the action demo. How did it stack up against its obvious inspiration, Ninja Gaiden?

Not great, as it turns out. 

The game starts you off in a cut-scene wherein you and a few of your semi-futuristic military ninja pals drop out of a plane.  On the way down, you’re treated to a few mid-air battles that play out in the form of button pressing sequences.  These are simple, but pretty well executed, and the city and your ninja look fantastic as he falls to Earth (even if he does look almost exactly like Ryu Hayabusa).  After a few single-button confrontations, your feet hit the ground, and you are almost immediately thrown into your first experience with standard combat.  X acts as your primary attack button, and Y performs a heavy attack, and the left trigger blocks.  The X and Y buttons can be used in conjunction to string together fairly long combos, but in the brief time I had with the game, I found that not only are there very few distinct combos, making the combat less skill-based than Ninja Gaiden an more of a button-masher, but that the controls are surprisingly unresponsive, taking even more away from what should be a quality action experience.  This might be excusable if the enemies you were fighting had some sort of unique or interesting design, but sadly, that isn’t the case.  Ninjas vs. demons has been done to death in the Ninja Gaiden series, but that didn’t stop Microsoft from basically copying and pasting the spider-demon enemies from NG2 into Ninja Blade.  With uninspired designs, nearly non-existent AI, and repetitive attack patterns, you’ll be hard-pressed to find less interesting baddies in a recent game.  Fortunately, Ryu your ninja warrior is more well-rounded, with the ability to switch between three different weapons on the fly.  The different weapons are distinctive and offer completely different attack styles, from the whirling, speed-based attacks of the Twin Falcons to the lumbering overhead swings of the The Oni slayer.  The demo only allows you to fight a few enemies, but their health seems to be higher than it will be in the actual game, because you end up spending almost five minutes standing in one spot, fighting the same five guys.  If every enemy has this much health in the game, we’re either looking at a 30-hour game or a 6-hour game that only includes three levels.

Once the protracted first battle is over, another cinematic button-pressing sequence is initiated, leading you to a fight with the demo’s only boss, an 80-foot spider named Arachne.  For a second, let’s forget that “Giant Spider” is right up there with “Giant Crab” and “Boulder Monster” on the list of the most clichéd level bosses.  Even if it weren’t the 8 millionth time we’ve seen a giant spider as a level boss, the fight would still be an uninteresting mess.  The game gives you no indication how to hurt the boss other than a brief pause screen that explains how to throw your shuriken, his attacks at the beginning of the fight are timed so cheaply that a single knockdown can easily result in not being able to get back to your feet for the rest of the fight, and actually hitting him in his weak spot is sometimes impossible due to awful collision detection.  Even worse, throwing your shuriken puts you into an uninterruptible animation that leaves you completely vulnerable for about two seconds afterwards.  This means that even when you manage to hit the spider-bastard, you’ll still end up getting clocked by the flaming rocks he hurls at you (yes, the giant spider throws flaming rocks for some reason).  This may be a glitch inherent to the demo that will be cleaned up before the game actually releases, but the end of these animations also makes the screen become pixelated to the point where nothing on the screen is recognizable.  Tapping the left trigger sends you into “Ninja Vision,” which highlights enemies’ weak spots and allows you to see the world in slow motion.  This helps you deal with the boss battle, but once the effect ends, you’re subject to the same two-second delay and pixelization. 

The boss only allows you to take half of his health away, then escapes to fight another day, ending the demo.  As Ninja Gaiden clones go, Ninja Blade is…one of them.  There’s nothing unique or engaging about the game, and the excellent visuals can’t make up for sub-par combat and lazy design.  Hopefully, From Software has a lot of changes still to be made before the game is released.  As it stands, though, there’s very little to recommend the game based on the first ten minutes.

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