Dat Review: Mark of the Ninja (XBLA)

Today I'll be talking about a new game on the Xbox Live Marketplace called Mark of the Ninja.  I somehow managed to evade Borderlands 2 and all the hype around it (I was very surprised to see how many stores it sold out), and caught the glimpse of Mark of the Ninja (hereby referred to as Mark [lovingly titled Mark, the Ninja by my girlfriend]) on the 360 dashboard, I thought hey, let's give this a shot.  So I downloaded the trial.  20 minutes later I had purchased the game, and now you'll find out why.

Overview

Mark of the Ninja is made by KLEI entertainment, who also made Shank, a game I was looking forward to but was sorely disappointed with it's tiring pace.  It's a 2D platformer in the same artstyle of Shank, and other 2D style art games like Castle Crashers.  It has animated cutscenes between the gameplay.
 The game is about Mark, the Ninja.  Ok that was a joke.  The main character is an unnamed silent protagonist.  He is part of a ninja clan, and the game starts off with him becoming a typical chosen warrior who receives special tattoos.  The tattoos give him heightened abilities but also are told to "drive him to madness" by the end of his mission.  This is where the game really begins after the usual tutorial level.

In game pic.  Kill and throw him off the roof.

Story

Badass tattoos you wish you had.

The story of Mark is pretty solid.  It's an XBLA action title, so while it doesn't have the time to really build plot, develop characters and get you emotionally hooked, it's good for what it is.  I've played Braid, and I know people try to hold games to Braid's standards of storytelling, but in my opinion as an omni-gamer (someone who tries to play every game ever and respects games for being games and not being movies or books) Braid's story is too convoluted, confusing and vague; making the art crowd of gamers pretending that this was genius.
The story is about Ninjas in modern times, no time travel BS, no aliens or demigods, just a normal ass story about vengeance and betrayal.  For that, it's well told.  It's weird to see a purely animated game that has absolutely no humor in it at all, but it holds up without falling into that chasm of Japanime hell where what they say is absolutely retarded.

Rating: 8/10.  Good for an action game, but will not compel the player on it's own.


Gameplay:

The meat of the game.  It's a stealth action game, the quality of which is way better than it probably should be.  There's a lot of games with really bad stealth mechanics, where you feel like you get cheaped out, or you can likewise just cheat the game out with cheap tactics, but Mark does an amazing job of balancing variety and difficulty.  There are times when you'll breeze through most of a level, and then times where you'll die 4 or 5 times in a row trying to sneak past the guards in 1 spot.  It never feels cheap when you die, always that you miscalculated.  There have been a couple times though throughout the game where it glitched in good and bad ways.  I got killed my a control mishap once, which wasn't a big deal, but found a kind of unfair glitch by restarting checkpoints (basically if in the middle of the game recognizing a checkpoint, you get caught, you can hit restart checkpoint instead of dying and whatever event that happened will simply disappear).
So stealth is done great.  Kills feel great and somehow they managed to make the feeling of NOT killing great too; just getting past the enemies proves to be more difficult half the time.
The game offers talents and upgrades you can acquire by spending medals that you earned by beating scores, finding hidden items and completing level objectives.  The upgrades are awesome and have a great variety depending on the way you want to play.  The cornerstone of this are the unlockable costumes.  You can grab a costume that makes you silent, but takes away your weapon; a costume that gives you guaranteed stealth kills but takes away items, and etc.

Rating: 10/10.  Overall the action is what sells this game, and hell, does it deliver.  Fun, challenging, varietal, polished, and just an absolute blast that you can't understand until you start setting up your own kills, traps, and escapes.

Sound:

This stealth game doesn't really use much in the ways of music.  Everything is ambient, you listen to the guards, environment, and weather instead of really having a soundtrack.  While some of the guards sound really silly, "Hey there, this broken light shouldn't be broken.....oh well.", everything else in the level sounds authentic.  A lot of the sound effects are what you'd expect from a ninja game, gongs and ninja flutes galore.
Voice over work is great, minus some of the guards.  None of the lines sound forced, and they almost all feel natural.  Pronunciation is great, they don't sound like weeaboos when they speak Japanese words, which to a nerd like me, is important. 
The collectables you find in the game are scrolls, detailing the events of your clan's first leader, which are all done in Haiku form, which is awesome.  Pulls off artistic quite well without even a dash of stupid American sillyness, sounds very authentic.

Raing: 8/10.  While there wasn't a huge soundtrack, the sounds and voices were perfect for what this game was and is about; STEALTH.

Graphics:

It's great to see a 2D game, and not a 2.5 or 3D game.  I love the way sprites and hand drawn animations look in general, and while in this game it's computer done, it has that hand drawn look to it.  I personally think the way they draw their art assets, I kinda think it's lazy to make it look EXACTLY like their last 2 games.
Visuals are crisp, but not very bright.  The color pallet LOVES gray and black.  The game has this cool way of limiting your field of vision; instead of blacking out rooms that you're not in entirely, it's blurred and darkened just enough to where you can't make out the contents of the room, but you can tell if guards are walking around by the sound of their footsteps, ALMOST LIKE YOU'S A FUCKING NINJA!  It does annoy me sometimes though, I start to wonder if I'm going blind on some levels just from all the damn blurry black crap everywhere.
Only other notable thing is that the cutscenes are well done.  They should be given credit for actually making cutscnes in their game that isn't based off the game engine, which is what every single XBLA game does nowadays.  Although, just like with the art assets, it's 100% a clone of Shank.

Rating: 7/10.  Graphics are good and sometimes add to the experience, but don't earn points for ingenuity and color palette.


Replayability:


I believe at this point I'm at the last level, and I've popped in probably around 4 hours.  I expect to be done with the game by 5 hours total.  As of now that's the standard for most XBLA games.  The replayability really comes in if you're an achievement whore.
There is a New Game+ mode where it's basically just a harder game and you can work down the list of 30 achievements (wow) and try beating the game in the different styles (I'm murdering the crap out of every guard I come across, but after I'm planning on stealthing the entire game without killing anyone with one of the special costumes).  I estimate any normal caliber gamer can have it full achieved by 8 hours, which is pretty great for a game that doesn't involve that monotonous metroid-vania style item collecting or playing 50 ranked matches online.
The cool thing about this game though is it's "Mirror's Edge" quality where you can pick it up after not playing it for 6 months and you can still have a super fun experience without much commitment; a badass game to pick up for an hour for quick satisfaction.

Rating: 8/10.  While NG+ is slightly superficial, the gameplay and achievements are crazy fun which will keep you coming back.

Yeah, that's not badass at all.

Overall: 9.5/10

Don't average out the scores and try to make sense of it, it won't work.  My principals of rating a game are to rate the individual key aspects of the game, and my overall score comes from the experience that happens when you combine all of them.  While the graphics don't warrant and 9.5 on their own, they create a 9.5 quality game when mixed with the gameplay, sound and etc.

I could not recommend this game any higher.  This currently steals the #2 spot on my favorite XBLA games (because you better believe Castle Crashers is nigh-untouchable) because of the sheer fun I have with it.  The game does stealth better than fucking Metal Gear.  Don't feel compelled to believe me though, download the demo and I DARE YOU not to buy it.  Stealth the way it was meant to be, fun in it's purest form.

Metacritic Score - 90/100

Gametrailers Score - 9/10