When you think badass action games featuring ninjas, you normally think of Ninja Gaiden. Smooth stylish gameplay, lots of patience and skill require to do most tasks… You know, great gameplay and challenge. Ninja Gaiden was the action game mostly done right, only surpassed slightly by the Devil May Cry series (disregarding part 2)
To cash in on the idea, From Software brings you Ninja Blade. But all it is is basically a “what if” scenario, where instead of being good, Ninja Gaiden sucked ass. That is Ninja Blade in a nutshell.

Read on and see the suckyness!

Why the game is horrible
There is 1 major problem with the game. That one element really helps in making what could be a great game with some polishing, REALLY BAD. What one element could make an action game boring? Quick Time Events (QTEs). Yeah, you know, the laziest gameplay element in all of gaming? Yeah, that. I thought Wintrale might have exaggerated just a bit when he told me the game was a QTE-fest, but then I knew he was telling the truth right when I started up the game. The very first thing you do is a QTE.

The QTEs themselves are standard fair. The button appears and you have a lot of time (like 2 seconds) to press it. There’s another circle that closes in the the button and you have until it disappears. Depending on where it is when you do the QTE you get graded, though whichever grade you get doesn’t have any impact on the cutscene. So what’s the point? 
When you miss a QTE, the game rewinds through the cutscene and you have to try again, but not just the QTE you missed, but all the QTEs in that sequence. Which is really stupid since the buttons you must press don’t change. There’s no limit to how many times you can retry, which is stupid, but the whole rewinding thing is annoying. Really, I’ve seen the cutscene already, I don’t need to watch it again. Just cut back to the last QTE and stop bugging me with the whole cutscene. Those were the worst QTEs ever… after the ones in the PC version of Quantum of Solace…

But the QTEs aren’t the only problem. The other big problem is the combat against normal enemies. Unless it’s just that the enemies in the demo are really lame… well the game is a button masher. Pure and simple. You can do a variety of “ranged” and “close-ranged” attacks, but in the end you just press random buttons and win. You also have ninjutsu which pwns everything around you, and sometimes enemies with shield comes and that’s when you switch to the heavier sword. No strategy and just plain button mashing. To give an illusion of “this is not a button masher”, you can stop attacking to block or dash to move away from enemies. Yay…

The last part of the game, after a bunch of really lame QTEs, has you go up against a huge spider crab thing. And you know what’s weird? This part almost feels like… a game! Yeah, strange. The boss sends shockwaves which you must avoid to get close to him and them you destroy his legs when you’re close enough. I was almost enjoying it when suddenly… QTEs. Yeah. Way to ruin the only good part in the demo guys…

How this game could be made somewhere at least near “good”
Remove all the QTEs. All of them. Think of some interesting gameplay elements instead. You know, instead of pressing buttons in cutscenes which bring you to the next area, why not MAKING YOU FUCKING GO TO THE NEXT AREA YOURSELF? I mean, the ninja has wires and such, this could be similar to spiderman 2 or something. Add some other moves and tricks you can do to make it a bit original and VOILA, you have something better than lame QTEs. Implement an actual aerial battle system instead of making you press buttons during cutscenes. I don’t know, anything to make the game a bit less lame. Make the fighting more strategic and not just “I press random buttons and win!”. The only semblance of strategy was switching swords to hit the enemies with shields.

Conclusion
This game is gonna suck balls. And you know what the worst part is? It’s gonna be popular. Just like God of War before it, people are going to call this piece of crap “a great game”. But people don’t understand that QTEs, especially bad ones like this, are just about the laziest thing a game developer can do. And they aren’t fun, not in the slightest.
Screw QTEs, they should just die. And this game along with it. Something that was potentially interesting was almost completely destroyed by that one lame gameplay element.

jobocan Games, impressions