The flow of combat and set pieces in Shinobi: Art of Vengeance are amazing, but everything outside of that is unfortunately pretty flawed.

As you progress through the game and grow your skill set, the combat encounters get more and more satisfying to go through as you become more familiar with the moves you have at your disposal. The enemies with big shields were always annoying to deal with, but every other enemy type was fun to throw all of your moves at to create really cool combat encounters.

Platforming in most sections was very straightforward and when things got more difficult in the challenge sections, I wasn’t having a whole lot of fun. There was nothing really new or unique in any of the puzzle sections, so nothing really stood out as being particularly memorable. And for some reason they had a lot of these sections feature block pushing, which always sucked and felt super out dated. There are tons of moments where I died due to things that were right outside of the camera. I really wish it was a bit more dynamic to give you more of a heads up in those situations or at least give the player a bit of control to see a bit more by holding up or down for long enough, similar to how they handle it in Hollow Knight.

The story wasn’t anything special and I was kind of bummed with how anticlimactic some of the bigger moments were. The level where you fight inside of a Kaiju had a lot of promise, but it started with a still image of Joe going into the beast and ended with a still image of the aftermath of taking out its heart. It felt really flat, especially with how dynamic the game had been up to this point. The ending was also a big let down. I was fully expecting an explosive boss fight, but it was pretty lame and didn’t even stack up to some of the bosses you go up against mid way through the game. It really seemed like the back 25% of this game was either rushed or they ran out of budget to see everything through that they intended to.

Speaking of bosses, they were a mixed bag but overall pretty disappointing. There were maybe 2 or 3 that I felt really took advantage of the combat mechanics, but all of the others either had movesets that were largely boring or mechanics that were just straight up annoying to deal with. Given the fact that they give you a super move that let’s you fill your health all the way to full when it’s charged really trivialized a lot of these encounters.

Collectables in this game were kind of a mixed bag. Instead of being a proper metroidvania where all of the areas are interconnected, all of the levels are standalone. The devs do have the good graces to allow you to freely teleport to any previously discovered checkpoint which was nice for backtracking. If I had to play through the entire level from start to finish, that would have been a major deal breaker. Along with not resetting combat encounters and puzzles, highlighting areas where collectables are/were found, and giving you a full map to see areas that have and haven’t been discovered, going back to collect everything wasn’t a huge slog. I do wish that they left the icons of what had been collected on the map to make tracking everything a bit easier, but that’s just a tiny nitpick.

Overall I think there were just a few too many things that were mishandled to really make this the great game it had the potential of being.

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