Shinobi: Art of Vengeance review: "So close to being to a pitch-perfect revival of a classic series, but just can't quite line up the killing blow"

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance makes an incredible first impression. It looks gorgeous, it controls like a dream, and its combat feels sublime. Unfortunately, all those positives are spread across levels that don't hold up their end of the bargain, dragging down the Art of Vengeance experience with repetitive encounters, blind jumps, and half-baked encouragement to explore.

Longtime Shinobi fans will get the basics: As Joe Musashi, you'll take down foes with a combination of sword, kunai, and various kinds of ninja magic as in the classic Shinobi games, but Art of Vengeance is very much a modern take on the long-dormant series. You progress through a linear set of levels, but they're expanded with a slight Metroidvania twinge, letting you return to old stages with new abilities to hunt down collectables.

Those levels are punctuated with big arena battles with waves of enemies, and this is where Art of Vengeance sings. A simple combo system focused around light and heavy attacks lets you string together launchers, dodge-roll into follow-up attacks, and quickly dart between foes to manage the whole field of battle.

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While you can simply whittle down enemy health bars like normal, it's better to instead fill their execution gauge – a sort of guard break meter which, once filled, lets you instantly kill that enemy from anywhere on screen at the touch of a button. Executing a foe this way results in a shower of health pickups, kunai ammo, and gold to spend on upgrades – and the rewards get exponentially greater the more enemies you take out in a single execution.

When you play like this, much of the combat becomes about not killing your adversaries. Heavy attacks fill the execution gauge faster than light strikes, but they still deal regular damage, so a good combo will often leave an enemy a pixel away from death while simultaneously readying them for an execution. It becomes a challenge of keeping that enemy alive while getting another marked for an instakill – and then another, and another, and…

Chaining together three or four foes in one big execution is immensely satisfying when you can manage to do it, and the challenge of doing so is never frustrating, because it's optional. Don't need the rewards? Just kill the baddies outright.

It's an unusual rhythm for a combat-driven action game – seeing an enemy healer spawn, contrary to every other game I've ever played, is a relief here, because it makes it harder to accidentally kill other foes – but it gives Art of Vengeance a feel all its own.

This sort of fun, fast combat is why Art of Vengeance was so compelling to me after going hands-on at Summer Game Fest, but unfortunately those fights are spread across stages that are often dull and occasionally frustrating in their design. The dozen or so levels that you'll complete over the course of the roughly ten-hour story sit at an awkward middle ground between old-school linear action and more open-ended exploration.

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Some stages are bigger than others, but they all have a Metroidvania-style map, checkpoints that let you fast-travel between areas, and hidden secrets just off the beaten path. Getting around these levels feels great thanks to snappy movement and always-fun abilities like double-jumps and wall-running, but the maps are largely made up of straightforward tunnels and simple platforms that very quickly become boring.

When the levels aren't boring, they're often frustrating. Aside from a handful of bosses and secret areas, Art of Vengeance isn't a particularly challenging game, but you'll sometimes find yourself making blind jumps over gaping abysses and hoping that there's a platform on the other side, which never feels great. And while those abysses are usually bottomless pits that drain a bit of health and send you back to solid ground, occasionally, a hole will turn out to be a path to a hidden secret. A light, red glow often denotes a deadly pit, but the effect is subtle enough that I found myself constantly second-guessing where I should be looking for secrets.

Most levels have a hidden portal that'll take you to a bonus platforming challenge, and these areas are where your precision will actually be put to the test. Spinning saw blades, instant-death spikes, and other deadly obstacles create absolute platforming gauntlets that are among the most memorable bits of Art of Vengeance, and completing them is usually a satisfying challenge.

But there are issues here, too. The hitboxes around those instant-death obstacles are often inconsistent, leading to deaths that feel unearned. Deathtraps sometimes only activate when you get near them, so you'll be flying through an intense series of jumps and start positioning yourself to dodge a static series of buzzsaws – when suddenly, the saws start moving at the exact moment you're too close to react to them. You might lose a minute or two of progress in the challenge room to a moment like this.

In a game where the fights and basic mechanics of movement are so well-considered, I've found myself pretty dejected over just how little the levels capitalize on the strength of Art of Vengeance's basic action. The best stages here are the ones that are essentially just straight shots from left to right with fights along the path, because they're the only ones where the level design fully gets out of the way.

Parts of Shinobi: Art of Vengeance are genuinely best-in-class, and games that feel this good to control are rare indeed. It's unfortunate, then, that it's held back from its full potential by stage design that ranges from bland to frustrating. This is so close to being to a pitch-perfect revival of a classic series, but Art of Vengeance just can't quite line up the killing blow.

For more from Sega's past, check out our ranking of the best Sonic games of all time.