Nightshade PS2 lets you play as a female ninja - Hibana - who wears a rather wild red and white outfit. She's in a modern landscape, but uses swords and virtual AI style goggles.



This very much plays out like an extremely difficult arcade game. Your camera spins around you wildly while you attack. You get targeted on the wrong thing, the camera turns around, and you're dead. Then you head back to a checkpoint or the beginning of the level. Luckily they do at least have various levels of gameplay so you can send it down to easier levels to get the hang of the buttons before cranking it up again.

The graphics just don't add much to the game atmosphere. They are often very simple and blocky. You get the sense that you're moving around within a computer game, not an actual environment.

The sound is a techno beat that throbs throughout the entire fighting. Again, it doesn't help with the atmosphere, unless your chosen atmosphere is 'tv action cartoon'.

Gamers who enjoyed Shinobi will at least want to rent this game to follow along the storyline. If they actually mastered Shinobi then they might want to get this game if only to take advantage of those skills they built up. Most other gamers will probably find this very frustrating and just not providing enough benefits to try to work through it.

So for those Shinobi gods, definitely buy this game. You'll enjoy another foray into your Shinobi world. However, for the vast majority of gamers, I'd suggest one of the many other games out there that let you into this style of gameplay without the headaches.

Rating: 2/5 for its lack of improvements over the original Shinobi game, to make it more accessible to most gamers.

Buy Nightshade from Amazon.com