When you are tasked to review games, you have to learn to take the good games with the bad. Sometimes you get to work on a game the caliber of a Gears of War or Forza 2, while other times you draw the shortest straw and wind up with a game like Tenchu Z. From Software’s latest title might sound great on the surface – ninjas, stealth style game play, and lots of ninja gadgets – the fact remains that Tenchu Z suffers a fatal flaw in nearly every aspect that a good reviewer looks for. This newest title in the Tenchu series is for the gamer that is willing to overlook all these flaws, and play the game the way the developers intended.
Tenchu Z is set in a period of civil war in the territory controlled by the Goda clan. The rival Ogawara clan has been expanding its influence in an attempt to oust Goda, and gain power for itself. As Goda’s up and coming ninja, its up to you to tackle missions designed to foil Ogawara’s plans, as well as undertake side missions to deliver justice to drug dealers, crooked merchants, and perverted monks. The story is not held together very well from mission to mission, so it is difficult to understand how the plot is unfolding. There are some decent looking cutscenes before and after your mission, but they don’t advance the story well at all. You’re better off just taking each mission at face value, rather than trying to fully understand what’s going on.
The first step is to design your ninja. The game has a lot of variety here, but just like anything else in Tenchu Z, there is a fatal flaw. You can choose a male or female ninja, select from 20+ faces, choose hairstyles, clothing and accessories. As you advance in the game, you will unlock more clothing and accessories for purchase, but you do not have any ability to preview an item before you buy it. That means you will have to use your limited funds to guess what an item might look like. Because most items offer several varieties of the same type, you’ll have to guess what color you’re buying as well. Without the ability to preview items, you’re left with wasting your budget with guesswork, when that same budget is also used to buy various ninja gadgets, such as throwing stars and smoke grenades. The lack of a preview is a huge flaw when there are scores upon scores of items available for purchase. Not all items fit the look of a ninja, as I found out when one of my lucky guesses earned me a set of fish net stockings for my female ninja. Though it certainly doesn’t fit standard ninja wear, it was good for a few laughs online.
The graphics in Tenchu Z do not meet next gen standards. The characters are modeled fairly well, and look decent enough, but the AI warriors come in only a few varieties, and one looks just like the next. There is very little diversity in animations. Your primary attack, the stealth kill, comes in only two varieties, so it gets very boring seeing the same old stab through the back followed by unrealistic and unimpressive blood spurting. The textures are second rate at best, and one city or castle looks exactly like the one before. There is some very poor collision detection, particularly on angled surfaces, such as a roof (where you will spend a lot of your time). While creeping along a rooftop, it is not uncommon to see one foot going through the roof while the other is held out in mid-air. Character shadows also present a problem to Tenchu Z, with enemies casting shadows through walls and floor, or your own character casting a strange full body shadow on the ground, while the wall you’re perched upon does not. This demonstrates to me that not a lot of thought, time and money were spent on this title. Gamers should return the favor.
In theory, the point of the game is to sneak around, using the shadows to your advantage to reach the mission objective. I say “in theory” because I have to drop another F-bomb…FLAWED. You simply do not need to sneak around if you don’t want to. There is nothing preventing you from sprinting to the person you have to assassinate and ending the mission in 20 seconds. If you play the game as it was intended, you may get some enjoyment out of the first several missions, but if you choose to run around and make a lot of noise, you can get away with it.
