Tenchu: Return From Darkness

"The Most Complete Tenchu Ever"

“Tenchu” is one of the great titles among the long line of stealth games that have been released since the debut of the Sony Playstation years ago. Released alongside Konami’s “Metal Gear Solid”, both games established a new genre that has now been a phenomenal success in the gaming world. Wrath of Heaven, the third installment of the series marked the first to debut on a 128-bit console, now a year later “Return from Darkness” has arrived on Xbox, and as it stands is the most complete “Tenchu” yet.

“Return from Darkness” takes place after the original “Tenchu: Stealth Assassins” where two ninjas, “Rikimaru” and “Ayame” return to silence a new threat rising in the form of a powerful magician named “Tenrai”. The storyline is fine if a bit ridiculous at times, especially with the return of “Onikage” who you happen to kill about a billion times in the first two titles. It’s apparent to me now that no characters can actually die in “Tenchu” with some magically returning from the dead again and again, until it’s just plain silly. Yet there are enough cut-scenes to make it interesting enough, but it’s not as engrossing as the storyline found in “Tenchu 2”.

“Tenchu” plays similar to that of Metal Gear Solid’s third person action allowing players to slide alongside walls, peer around corners and eliminate enemies in pure silence; however “Tenchu” is far more lenient on aggressive play mechanics and stealth tactics that other games like “Splinter Cell” don’t tolerate. All of the classic “Tenchu” gameplay elements are here as well as a host of new abilities that you earn for performing a certain number of stealth kills per level. Doing so earns you various abilities such as clinging to ceilings, cloaking yourself on walls or new power attacks. The stealth action is still superb; you don’t have to be a hardened veteran to pull off dozens of silent kills. The gameplay remains literally unchanged from the original two, and instead banks off of the already successful engine by adding more depth and replay than before.

Yet because of this Activision still hasn’t ironed out some of the bugs that plagued its predecessors. Combat can be frustratingly difficult at times as you simply can’t block your enemies’ attacks nor do you have time to defend as you’re regaining your stance. You’ll often find yourself backed into corners taking endless hits until by pure luck you happen to evade and fight back. The bosses you face later on in the game are just as cheap as well, each one has a special attack that they can perform at will that cannot be avoided, this might not be such a bad thing if they didn’t do it every ten seconds. It doesn’t ruin the game by any manner, but is worth mentioning because it can become very frustrating.

The very enjoyable “create-a-level” from Tenchu 2 has been taken away and replaced by a two player mod split-screen mode with deathmatch and co-op options. This may seem like a great idea at first, and co-op can sometimes be fun but the levels are so tiny and lifeless that you’ll wish the “create-a-level” mode was back. Yet where the split-screen fails, Xbox Live support saves the day for the multiplayer. Granted the levels are still small and only support two players in a game, but if you can find a hardened “Tenchu” veteran to play with the game can be a blast and make you look past some of its shortcomings.

“Return from Darkness” looks and sounds great. The graphics have been bumped up from the PS2 version, and support more crisp textures now, but the biggest upgrade is in the character models that look fantastic on the Xbox, especially with the new lighting effects to boot. The sound effects are solid enough to get the job done, but the musical score is superb using a variety of authentic Japanese instruments to truly give the game a more engrossing atmosphere.

So what’s new for the Xbox version? A few things. The obvious bump in graphics is nice, as are the two new abilities and new levels, but they’re nothing that’s going to stun you. As mentioned before the game supports Xbox Live play, the co-op mode can be quite fun but the versus modes absolutely blow chunks. The other problem with Live play is it hasn’t been designed as well as it could be, the co-op levels need to be bigger, there needs to be more of them and there’s amazingly quite a bit of lag in some servers which is ridiclious since there are plenty of other Live games that have more going on in their games than this.

Complaints set aside; “Return from Darkness” still does provide an excellent stealth action game that earns its place alongside the greats and even out does big budget titles like the mammoth “Splinter Cell” in my opinion. Even though Activision may have not fleshed out this Xbox port as much as they could’ve, they still know how to press all the right buttons and the underlying game is bursting with plenty of stealth action and replay that rewards continual play to make the game one you’ll definitely come back to. So if you’re starved for some ninja action and don’t want to deal with the frustrating garbage of the bloated “Ninja “Gaiden”, you need look no further than “Return from Darkness”.

Pros:
+ Great gameplay
+ Easy to use stealth system
+ Plenty of replay
+ Some great graphics
+ Xbox Live can be lots of fun
+ Varied levels

Cons:
- Co-op isn’t as good as it could be
- Combat can be frustrating
- Cheap bosses
- No downloadable content
- This port shouldn’t have taken a year

Graphics- 9.0
Gameplay- 8.5
Sound- 9.0
Overall- 8.5

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/18/04