Tenchu Shinobi Taizen (review)
OK after playing this for a few hours I can say without doubt that if you are a fan of Tenchu you will LOVE this game.
The graphics are as good as PS2 and the controls (while strange at first) are almost perfect. The fact that we will all be able to design our own levels and share them with each other is awesome. This means that this will be the ultimate Tenchu! We will never run out of levels!
I hope we can upload highest rankings into a online leader board too, that would be great.
But of course the game has a few problems. For a start as everyone knows by now, the draw distance is bad, VERY bad. Like Tenchu 1 and 2 bad. Does it spoil the game? No. Does it make it frustrating at times? yes very much so. Especially when I can't see the other side of a large room! It makes finding guards difficult even when you are almost right on top of them, causing very annoyingly cheap occurrences of getting spotted.
It seems very strange after playing games like Tony Hawks, Ridge Racer, Spider-man 2 & Hot Shots golf, all of which have great draw distances, that the draw distance would be so poor. Especially when it is so crucial to gameplay. Just because we put up with it in the first two games when we didn't know better is no reason for it being acceptable now. I know all the Tenchu fans will buy the game anyway, but the could lose a lot of casual gamer sales based on the poor reviews it might receive if this issue isn't addressed before western release.
Also the camera is set up to rotate around you when you do a stealth kill, so sometimes while adjusting for surroundings it will go through walls or through you and make it impossible to see the kill. There are a few other small problems, like not being able to rotate while crouched (can only sidestep). but nothing that would come close to spoiling the game for Tenchu fans.
Overall I would give this game - 8.5 / 10
But I remember playing the first Japanese Tenchu and the English release having a lot of small bugs fixed. We can pray to the video game gods that they improve the draw distance and some of the other bugs before it gets a US release. Hell they should use 333mhz if it would increase the draw distance by 30%!, I'll take that over battery power! I can always recharge (and I have a spare). With fixed draw distance this would be one of my all time favourite games!
