Game review: Mark of the Ninja

This review is all spoilers, so I wanted to get that out of the way first and let you know to avoid this post if you’re wanting to play the game without knowing the full story.

I got introduced to Mark of the Ninja via a Twitter trailer, and I ranted about how much gore was on display for the full length of the trailer. I was contacted by one of the game designers who told me that I could play the game without killing anyone. I then decided to watch the reviews, and many folks also spoke of this option to not kill. Of course that intrigued me, so when I had some free funds, I downloaded a copy for my Xbox.

Well, let’s get this out of the way: that sales point about no killing is a lie. You can play the game without killing the guards, but there are a number of boss fights that you have to kill someone to progress to the next level. I found this out because during my first play, I wanted to know how to get past the first guard without killing him, and all the YouTube walkthroughs showing a no-kill run were based on playing the game after a successful first run. On the second play through, (which is called New Game+) all the tools and weapons you collected in the first game are available to you from the start, so what the players did to avoid the guards wouldn’t work for me, not having collected those items yet.

This led me to run a search asking whether any player had completed a no-kill game on the first try, and I found that it was simply impossible to have a no-kill game at all. Examples of the boss fights were given, where even going in unarmed doesn’t prevent you from making a killing blow. Ergo, the game makers blatantly lied to me to get a sale. We’re not talking a marketing claim or a misinterpreted review either. Someone working for Klei contacted me to tell me about the no-kill option. Nothing irks me worse than to buy something based on an ideal, only to find out that that “feature” is a lie.

Being so mad, I opted to YouTube the ending to see if I should bother playing at all, and I decided that okay, I could play this stupid game, and I’d just go through and kill as many people as possible. Guards, bosses, whatever.

And then the game started, and I became even more angry fast. Why? Because *SPOILER* the companion leading your ninja to his goals isn’t real. A first-time player wouldn’t know this because the game is trying to trick you into thinking she’s really there. But this recognition of the fact makes every level that much more ridiculous. The first game level opens with your ninja waking up, and this chick is telling him where to find enemies, items, or allies. She’s saying stuff like, “They kidnapped other ninja, and you must free them.” But, if she’s an extension of my awareness, and I was unconscious from being tattooed, how does she know anything that I don’t know already?

I could give a lot of gaping plot hole examples where her knowledge is impossible, but I want to move on to the “fog of war” effect that limits my ninja’s line of sight. On the one hand, this feature was kind of interesting, as it required me to sneak around open spaces and be wary of approaching footsteps. But the game frequently has my guide pan the camera far ahead and point out guards, traps, and goals that I shouldn’t be able to see. She “scouts ahead” for me, I guess. But even if the writers had taken this into account and claimed she was an out of body projection, the whole method of showing upcoming challenges ruins the point of having a fog of war.

This fog also becomes negated at closed doors, where if I lean against them, the whole next room is revealed. I can’t see a dude just over a ledge even if he’s five inches away, but I can see through a closed door? Maybe they could have said my ninja was peering through a keyhole and I would have believed that, even if it is a bit anachronistic. But I don’t buy my dude having super ninja senses to see through a door when he can’t see ten feet in front of himself.

And on a completely random tangent, if my companion is a delusional extension of myself, why does my dudely ninja project an inner hot chick? After mulling this over, I thought that a great ending plot twist could have been, “And after killing her treacherous master, she went to Thailand and had surgery, and she lived happily ever after.” That shit makes about as much sense as the real ending, and you know a whole bunch of straight male gamers would have their tiny minds blown if it turned out their buff ninja dude hero was really a repressed transsexual.

I digress, the guards all possess standard-fare AI for stealth games. Two guys may be guarding a room, and one suddenly vanishes while the other had his back turned. You’d think this would raise their alertness level when they turned back around and found an empty space where their buddy was, but no. They shrug, puff their cigarette and look the other way again, allowing me to kill them without even a hint of danger or tension for me. A single guard is watching a prisoner, but if I blow out the lights and make them turn their back, they don’t seem overly concerned that their prisoner is missing one second later.

Guards who are alone are worse, because their canned scripts still read from the same list as the guys working together. So you have guys alone who are emoting lines like, “Did you hear something?” or, “Better go check that out,” or “It’s nothing, let’s move on.” So I don’t think my ninja is the only one talking to invisible people. But my excuse is, I’m wearing poison tattoos to give me super-ninja powers. What’s the main bad guy’s excuse for only hiring the mentally ill to guard his bases?

This nonchalant dialogue bugged me a lot, so much so that I turned it into a drinking game. Seriously, your invading army is on a ninja base, and you’re hunting ninja. If all the lights in the room blow out at the same time, you ought to be more aware that it’s not just a light bulb in need of repair.

At certain point in the third level, my guide leads me to a pack of smoke bombs left behind by “one of our scouts.” This is bullshit. The whole reason I’m out in the field like this is because the game tells me the antagonists have all this technology to detect ninja. I had to go and get tattoos with toxic mind-altering ink to be able to access super-ninja powers because no one else could do this mission. And yet, Joe A. Ninja strolls right through all that security to leave a box of smoke bombs? Aaaand take another drink.

By level four, I realized that the biggest problem I had was, I hadn’t thought of anything in the game as fun. I was playing this as an obligation because I paid for it and had to get some use out of it. But having already spoiled the ending, I can’t really deal with the story’s inconsistencies without getting annoyed at how much of the game is flat out lying to the player. Yes, there is something to be said for the use of an unreliable narrator, but in this case, the narrator is a part of my character, making it impossible for them to know the things they do. So we have a lousy game, and a lousy story that doesn’t make any sense.

And I had little quibbles, like how my bamboo darts could break shatterproof glass and render metal fuse boxes into puffy sparks, and they could kill pigeons and ravens, but couldn’t take down guards or dogs. Then there’s the hint prompts for various moves can’t be gotten rid of even after turning off button prompts in the options. You’re never allowed to guess what to do, because the game will just tell you. And once you understand that the person telling you all of this is a delusional extension of yourself, none of their information in past levels makes any sense.

Beyond that, I really hate the tattoo storyline. The idea that well-trained ninja can’t defeat the equivalent of mall security guards without super powers is both insulting to ninja and it plays heavily on the mystical arts cliche. Even if you ignore all the lousy stereotypes, the punch line of the game is, at the end you have to do the honorable thing and kill yourself to keep your clan safe. But you know what? In every video I watched on YouTube, everyone chose to listen to the delusion and kill their ninja master. Why? Because the delusion is too pretty to kill. If the game makers were wanting to impart some deeper message in the game, watching other players talk through that scene has shown me how badly they failed at making their point.

(By the way, I have plans on killing myself at the end, whenever I get there, just so I can see what the difference in endings is.)

I suppose I might have been less judgmental if I’d bought the game expecting a sub-standard slaughter-fest, but I was told by people at the company directly that I could do something in the game, and that was a lie. Worse, the game maker who spoke to me talked about how their game was meant to make people think about the violence they were committing. I really didn’t get that impression at all. In fact, most of the game is straight out of a B grade ninja movie made by white filmmakers who think jiujitsu is a form of magic instead of a martial art.

But even if I hadn’t felt lied to, the game just isn’t that good. I’d be playing it nightly to finish it quicker and move on to something else, but it upset hubby when I drained a bottle of rum and coke in ten minutes playing a drinking game for all the stupid shit in this brain dead production. So I have to wait a few days at a time, play a chapter, and then sober up. The alternative is alcoholism, and hubby doesn’t want that.

I give Mark of the Ninja 2 stars, and I’d only recommend it to people looking for a distraction between bigger games. The stealth options touted by other reviewers are simplistic at best, and the constant praise over the no-kill option in reviews completely glosses over the mandatory killings in boss fights. Ultimately, I feel cheated again by the promise of an option for pacifism, only to end up slaying everything that moves for the bonus points, dogs included.

Chalk this up to another indie game with a compelling core premise marred by a lack of polish in the story, enemy AI, and overall presentation. As I said, I’ll finish this one eventually, but I can’t expect that I’ll have any fun with it. I’m just playing to make back the money I put into it, and for a game, that’s a lousy reason to keep playing.