I’ve always been partial to a good stealth game and unfortunately, “stealth” is usually developer code for “shooting quietly”. You may get a silencer on your Beretta but that’s about the biggest concession.
Stealth has always been an optional game choice – you can use it if you want but at some point, it inevitably becomes easier to leave smoking craters than to hide corpses. Until now.
Mark of the Ninja is the absolute word in stealth. While it’s theoretically possible for you to charge the machine gun toting soldiers littered across the landscape, that’s a really great way to die over and over again.
Klei Entertainment have gone out of their way to meld together gameplay, stylised graphics, and the usual boatload of random violence. They even managed to squeeze in a storyline that, while far from unique, is solid enough to carry the game.
Mark of the Ninja follows an unnamed hero who wakes up just as his home base is being attacked. Fortunately, he’s just received a tattoo that grants him special skills, allowing him to rescue his fellow ninja and his master, Azai. Master Azai explains all about the special flower used to create the tattoo ink and casually mentions that those who use them eventually go mad and are forced to commit suicide.
That cheery pronouncement made, it’s time for our hero to save the shinobi from the relentless onslaught of technology. Mainly by slitting its throat.
Mark of the Ninja review
Smooth as a cloud of flesh eating bugs
The mechanics and gameplay are smooth, highly stylised and beautifully rendered down to the last detail. Klei’s distinctive animated style brings credibility to the game and does a great job of immersing the player in the world of the ninja.
The ability to go back and finish old levels again using new techniques, items and upgrades brings a great degree of replay value as do the usual gamut of Steam achievements available; 30 at time of writing.
The developers have also thrown in a suite of upgrades, customisations and unlockables for the character, each of which have the potential to completely rework the way you play the game. Each level is reportedly winnable using any combination of tools and techniques.
In-game dialogue is snappy and often humourous, although some of the voice work is a little hard to make out. Fortunately, there’s a subtitle option so that you can keep track of how pants-wettingly terrified the guards are of ninja-death.
Part of the gameplay that makes Mark of the Ninja so distinctive is the ability to psychologically torture your victims. Nothing is out of bounds for the ninja – drug-laced darts, showing them the dangling corpses of their erstwhile co-workers, and ravenous flesh-eating bugs are all on the table.
Flashes, bangs and super-hearing
Sound and light are used wonderfully to enhance the need for stealth throughout the game. Enemies have a cone of observation and various actions have clearly defined sound “ripples” that can really ruin your day if a guard is within hearing distance (staggeringly far away sometimes).
The only minor bugbears I have fall under control and pacing – the controls are fiddly to start with, leading to some frustration in the beginning. With time, all awkwardness is out the window and you accept the inner ninja master. I should mention that this is specific to the combination of mouse and keyboard – once I plugged in an Xbox 360 control, everything became nice and fluid again.
The pacing problem is really more about tracking. When the ninja falls off the screen, there’s often a noticeable delay before the POV tracks properly, sometimes dropping you right into the enemy’s view before you know what’s happening.
Saturday Morning Cartoon
The cartoonish graphics are superbly crafted and go a long way to making this a great game. Puffs of dust rise up when your character drops to the ground, the weather changes all the time and the use of lighting is subtle but effective. Even lightning flashes can briefly blow your cover so every aspect of stealth play has to be timed to perfection.
Overall, the sound was excellent, each effect unique and crisp. I found the background music to be repetitive and intrusive at its default level and ended up turning it off to avoid being distracted.
Is this the last word in stealth? I hope not. Is this a great game that sets the bar really high? Absolutely.
If you love stealth, this is definitely the game for you and you’ll have a ton of fun playing it over and over again.
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