Whenever you hear of a game about a ninja, you usually imagine yourself lurking in the shadows, with agile finesse, stalking your target and within the blink of an eye, placing your hand around their mouth, while sliding your blade into their back, disappearing as soon as their body touches the ground.
Unfortunately this is not the case with a lot of games out there that revolve around ninjas. Where most, if not all the stealth mechanics are stripped away, leaving nothing but a generic action brawler.
But what happens when you take the idea of a perfectly balanced stealth action game and give it to a company like Klei Entertainment? Well you end up with an amazing game, like Mark of the Ninja.
Mark of the Ninja offers a compelling story that revolves around a male character with an unknown name, whom the player must control.
The unknown character had been resting after receiving an extensive Irezumi tattoo, only to be awakened by a female ninja named Ora, all during an attack by a heavily armed private military group, on the dojo of the Hisomu ninja clan.
The unknown character defeats most of the attackers, saving his sensei, Azai, who then explains the power behind the tattoo and the legend surrounding it.
He bears special tattoos on his body and it is later revealed that the ink for these tattoos, comes from a special desert flower, which gives the bearer sharpened senses and reflexes, when slowly absorbed into the skin. But this comes at a price.
Over time, the bearer of this ink will slowly descend into insanity and must swear to commit seppuku, when the insanity starts to take hold.
The unknown character is sent on a mission to seek revenge on a private military group who attacked the dojo where he resides, only to end up uncovering a conspiracy that could have some major impacts on his clan. He now has another mission; to get to the bottom of this conspiracy before the ink drives him insane.
The gameplay in Mark of the Ninja is where the game really shines. Apart from offering you a proper stealth experience, the main thing that the game does right; is that it actually makes you feel like a deadly, but fragile being at the same time. Something that a lot of other games about ninjas fail to do.
Early on in the game, Klei Entertainment enforce the stealth mechanics on the player by removing the use of your sword until it is retrieved. Once you obtain the sword, you're given the option to assassinate anyone who stands in your way or to slip by unnoticed.
At the end of each level, the game rewards the player with honour points depending on how they play. Honour points go towards unlocking new techniques that add to the variety of ways the player can kill or navigate the levels. During gameplay, there is a score system that keeps track of how you're playing. Remaining undetected allows the player to maintain a higher score, whereas things like setting off an alarm, will cause the score to drop.
Navigating through the games levels makes for a fun experience. Everything usually flows smoothly and the character is very agile, allowing you to manoeuvre the levels swiftly. The great part of navigating the levels is that you're not restricted entirely to 1 path. You're given some options with hidden grates, vents or different elevations of a level, to allow you to pick the least dangerous path, if you choose to. The agile character also allows the player to run while hidden in the vents or even run up walls.
Unfortunately there are some issues with navigation and controls. You may find yourself in a situation where you want to swiftly pass over a ledge and into some vents, only to press the corresponding button and end up clinging onto a wall instead. In other situations where you need to aim certain items, you may find the aiming marker tends jumps around. Fortunately, most of the time, these minor issues can be overlooked and with practice, can even be avoided.
To add to these issues, sometimes after dying, the game can put you in a very difficult to get out of situation, which can almost break the game and force you to restart the entire level.
There are a great variety of enemies in the game that increase in challenge as you progress. The enemies can even require you to change up your strategies at times, giving you more need to vary in the items and methods you use to take them down.
These enemies include your standard guards, who can be approached either head on or silently for an easy to deal with kill. The flare guards, who carry a shield and fire flares to light up certain areas that can make for a difficult approach. The snipers, who can kill you with 1 bullet. The elite guards, who are much tougher than the other enemies and require the player to disable them before they can be stealth killed.
To add even more variety to the enemies, there are non-human enemies you'll encounter as well. These are the guard dogs, who are harder to sneak up on, as they can sense the player in a 180 degree radius. To add to this the challenge, they can even smell the player in hiding spots or even in the dark.
The gas mask guards are also another challenging enemy you encounter, as not only are they immune to smoke bombs, but they also have night vision goggles, making it next to impossible to sneak up on them in the dark. But fortunately a ninja's most dangerous enemy, light, can become a valuable ally as it can prevent these particular guards from seeing you.
The most notable and challenging enemies in the game are the stalkers who have a 360 degree sense radius and wrist lasers, which kill you almost instantly. But it's not entirely these features a lone that make them a formidable foe. The stalkers are actually trained ninjas, as a matter of fact, they function pretty much the same way the player does. This means that wherever the player can go, they can go as well. So they are best avoided at all costs, as they will follow you, even into hiding places like vents.
There are a great variety of items, weapons and skills to unlock in the game that add to the way you can navigate the levels and kill or elude enemies. There are distraction items which can be used to distract guards for an easier kill or to allow you to slip past them unnoticed. There are attack items which can be used to kill enemies from a distance and in a stealthy manner. And there are techniques to unlock, which are skills that provide unique ways to navigate or kill enemies in the levels.
One of the most notable items that you unlock is the grappling hook. This allows the player to zip around the level to either elude nearby enemies or to gain a height advantage. In combination with some of the unlockable techniques, the player can unlock skills allowing them to string up the bodies of the dead to inflict terror into other enemies, which can cause them to fire on their own allies.
One item in particular that you unlock in the game, is also one of the most notable, an item that should not be overlooked and may even be Klei Entertainment's way of paying homage to 1 of the most legendary stealth titles to ever exist in video game history. This item is the cardboard box. The player can use this box to sneak past enemies unaware, as long as they don't see the box moving. This definitely provides a lot of nostalgia for those Metal Gear Solid days, but also provides an amusing, yet strategic advantage.
The graphics in Mark of the Ninja are definitely very pleasing on the eyes. The cartoon graphics are crisp and clear but also do really well to deliver visual information to the player. Sounds being made by either the player or enemies are made evident with pond like ripples stemming from the source. When hidden in the dark, any colour from the player, enemies or the environment, is removed and turned to black.
Where most side scrolling games allow you to see everything ahead of you in the level, Mark of the Ninja employs a line of sight mechanic, whereby anything the character can't see, the player can't either. You're left to rely on the characters only remaining sense, which is hearing.
Fortunately even without line of sight, you can see bubble like circles appearing in areas where enemy movement is occurring. This also adds a nice challenge to the game by making you use your intuition to monitor the enemy's position if you can't see them.
The sound and music in Mark of the ninja is well made. While navigating the levels, the music is very low key and calming, and blends in well with the ambient sounds. When an alarm has been activated, the music kicks up the pace to create a bit of tension. While the player is hiding, the music will gradually calm itself down, reminding the player that they are not entirely safe just yet. At times, the music also has a slight hint of Japanese culture blended in, to help emphasise that you're in an east-Asian location.
Mark of the ninja does offer some great replay value, especially as you're rewarded for not killing a single soul or rewarded for killing everyone that exists in any level, giving some players incentive to test their skills at either method. There is also a leader board feature that you can use to compete with friends and there are also 2 different endings for the game.
But what really adds to the replay value is the new game plus mode. This increases the intelligence of the enemies and their danger levels, as they can kill the player with a single bullet. The player's line of sight will also be limited to a cone, aimed in the direction they are looking, thus preventing them from seeing behind, below or above them unless looking in that specific direction. This mode also prevents the player from seeing the enemy's line of sight, forcing them to judge the line of sight, from the direction the enemy's face is pointed. The player also no longer sees the radius in which their sounds will be heard.
Unfortunately this modes difficulty can be let down by all the gear you unlocked prior, making you a little bit over powered. Fortunately to balance this out a little bit, there are costumes or styles as they're known, that can be unlocked to give the player both an advantage and disadvantage at the same time. An example of this is the Path of Silence style, which when equipped, removes any sounds the player makes while running and allows them carry double the distraction items. Unfortunately though, this prevents the player from being able to carry a sword, forcing you to follow a path of silence.
Mark of the Ninja does very little wrong and does so much right for the stealth genre. There is absolutely nothing more satisfying then having the ability to drop down from a ledge, throw some darts at multiple lights in a room, while in mid-air and assassinating anyone below you, before they can react to the lights going out.
Mark of the Ninja definitely delivers a great stealth gameplay experience and definitely delivers a compelling story alongside it. It may very well even set the bar for what's expected of future games revolving around a ninja.