Gaming reviews
It’s a yokai for a yokai.
High-performance playtime
Stumbling into the first boss after slashing through a riverside village beset by demons, I begin to chip away at a screendominating health bar with my looted purple ninja knife. Little falls off before it roars, plunging me into a dark world and then summarily killing me with its saw-bladed cleaver. “Yeah, yeah,” I nod, “I’ve played Dark Souls,I know you’re not meant to be able to beat the first boss. It’s just flavour.” Then I respawn, and realise this is just the start of the mountain to come after all.
The large arsenal of possible weapons aren’t your only tools for spilling hot yokai blood. Your custom character is half-yokai themselves. Not only does this mean you can spend ameter to enter a powered-up state of demon-slapping fury, but also that you can harvest the powers of defeated enemies to use yourself in battle. Having access to these super moves is a surprisingly fresh twist on the rock-solid genre, giving you the option to literally press a ‘whack it with a giant hammer’ button if you just want to dish out some easy damage and take a breather. A Burst Counter even gives you the option to parry boss attacks and knock them off balance.
The backdrop for all this slaughter is Japan’s Sengoku period. A time of bloody war, it’s a great excuse to send you across Japan. Though the real world setting can feel a little repetitive compared to the fantasy vistas of the Souls games. You’ll see a lot of forests, caves, shrines, and forts. Even so, each distinct level is masterfully crafted, multiple paths weaving together alongside shortcuts to Kodama shrine checkpoints (Nioh 2’s brand of bonfires, where you revive sans your re-collectable upgrade currency when you croak).
There’s plenty to see, as the game easily took me about 70 hours to beat. Besides main missions it has plenty of side content, reworking previous maps into new challenges that feel fresh. And that’s not to mention the three pieces of bundled DLC that add even more. Little else in the genre has such satisfying gameplay, but there’s a limit to how much repetition you can avoid in a game this long.
Thanks to the quickfire stance shifting and pulse timing, playing this on keyboard is the domain of those who love to touch type business emails directly into cryptographic ciphers. There’s some noticeable pop-in on some far off enemies, and some environment textures look a little dated today, but the character designs and effects are right on point, and its in-depth photo mode is one of the best around. This is a game focused around performance, and it certainly delivers.
OSCAR TAYLOR-KENT Raising the genre highbar, Nioh 2 runs and plays beautifully. But perhaps you can have too much of a good thing.