Dana Vinson

Tenchu: Shadow Assassins Review

By Dana Vinson - Posted Feb 09, 2009

2 Comments

In this X-Play Review, we whip out our sword and take a look at 'Tenchu: Shadow Assassins' the new third person action game for the Nintendo Wii.

The Pros
  • Ninjas
  • Cool Japanese Score
The Cons
  • Unreliable stealth mechanics
  • Poor controls
  • Sub-par graphics

After 10 years the Tenchu series has weathered some less than stellar games, and a few deviations from the original stealth formula.  Most would agree that the farther back you go through Tenchu’s history, the better the games were.

The latest installment, Tenchu: Shadow Assassins heads to the Wii, with the promise of dealing death from the dark with flicks of your wrist.  A promise that is technically fulfilled, but ends up just not being that much fun.  Dealing death from shadows should be fun, right?

The Way of the Ninja

Tenchu: Shadow Assassins ReviewTo be fair, you shouldn’t compare Shadow Assassins directly to the previous games since this game is one of the aforementioned deviations from the original formula.  The open levels are gone, and have been instead broken down into tiny areas, containing a few enemies and a finish line.  Your goal is to get to the finish line, whether by being sneaky or murdering your way all the way there.  Once you’ve reached the goal, the next small area loads up.  You continue through a series of these until you’ve passed the overall chapter.  Rather than the overall strategic challenge of sneaking through guard patrols and navigating across the landscape, you have a series of much smaller, and more simplistic tactical puzzles to traverse in the new Wii title.  In the beginning, you’ll start to notice that it feels almost like a puzzle game rather than flexing your assassin muscles.

There are more elements that make Tenchu: Shadow Assassins a bit schizophrenic.  For example, you can not be seen - at all.  Now I actually kind of like this concept, but combine this with some pretty terrible controls, and stealth gameplay that will make you seriously doubt your Wii’s judgment, it becomes a real pain in the ass.  If you are seen, generally, the enemy attacks you and you vanish in a puff of bamboo leaves.  After griping about you, the enemy resumes patrol, and you regain control back at the beginning of the current board.  This is sort of cool the first time you see it, but you have to watch this sequence over and over again.  Any guys that you’ve dispatched are still dead when you head back out, but it just starts to get tedious. 

If you happen to be carrying a sword in your inventory, a brief Wii-mote wagging mini-game is triggered, where you have a split-second to match the position of the Wii-mote that is indicated onscreen.  This manages the near impossible task of making a fight with a Samurai, as a Ninja, pretty lame.  I guess I should mention here, that the game’s famous grappling hook is no more.  That alone is a pretty serious blow in the fun department.

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Darkness Fails

The darkness meter is a bit unreliable.  Some areas look dark to you, but checking your darkness meter shows that you are actually quite visible and need to move.  Other areas look like you have literally disappeared into a black void, your darkness meter confirms this, and yet enemies will spy you from surprising distances.  The best hiding spots are inside the spherical bushes that apparently grow all over feudal Japan.  There are areas where you can perform certain moves like hopping up and hiding in a corner near the ceiling, or hopping along rafters.  If an enemy happens to be positioned right, you can perform kill moves from these spots, but it takes more effort to get an enemy into position than it would to just make him turn his back while you rushed up to him.  But I guess if you consider lining an enemy up properly, and being seen the dozens of times it takes to get it right as part of the puzzle, then it becomes a bit more palatable.  It is still just not that much fun. 

The same line of thinking applies to the equipment, you do have a handful of tools to use, but they’re almost more of a pain to use than they’re worth.  I found Shuriken to be better used against the wall next to an enemy so that he’d turn around and look at the sound, than actually throwing the star into his face.

Ninja, Please!

Tenchu: Shadow Assassins ReviewAs for the visuals, Tenchu has never been a series that boasted cutting edge graphics but these graphics take me back.  There are enough nice looking games on the console to make one wonder how such a simple game as Tenchu: Shadow Assassins didn’t end up looking prettier.

I believe that I’m not alone in having a soft spot for this series.  It has never really been critically acclaimed but I find myself ignoring the bad dialog, the 2nd tier graphics, and questionable controls because running around as a Ninja is entertaining, the environments were fun to explore, and the traditional Japanese music is cool, but Tenchu: Shadow Assassins strays far enough from that path that I find it hard to recommend.

The Final Stroke

Tenchu takes a step away from stealth action, towards stealth puzzle.  Not a bad thing in and of itself, but it never really commits one way or the other.  Although if you squint your eyes just right you can kind of see how a Tenchu-style puzzle game could be fun. The series makes a blind leap into a new genre, only to fall flat on his face satisfying neither the fans of puzzle or action games.

Article Written By: Mr Sark