Ninja Gaiden 2

This isn't to say that Ninja Gaiden 2 never gets it right. There are lengthy sections in the game - entire sprawling levels, in some cases - which capture the beautiful challenge and satisfaction of the previous game. Up against ninja-type enemies, or even some of the better-designed demons, the game flows like liquid silk. Every weapon becomes a joy to use, with its own strengths and weaknesses to master, and every encounter becomes a delicious trial of your reflexes, skill, timing and positioning.

In a sense, it's the knowledge that Team Ninja knows how to do this right that makes it so frustrating when it goes wrong. Some lengthy sections of truly excellent play, combined with genuinely great boss battles - which are still spikes in the difficulty curve, but encourage you to grit your teeth and try again rather than howl in frustration and smash your 360 pad - just make it even more painful when it all goes to pot.

The designers are extremely random in terms of putting save-points directly before or after bosses, although at least they have the decency to auto-restart you at the beginning of a boss battle if you die during one. But one encounter, where you fight two bosses in a row with no intermediate save point, perfectly sums up the overall problem. Upon defeating the second boss (one of the game's cheapest, with lots of phases where you're expected to dodge bombardments of projectiles covering most of the play area), you get the final animation - sinking your scythe into its unprotected skull. For most of the game, this means the battle is over. In this specific battle, however, the boss explodes, and if you don't have enough health to survive it, or can't turn and block in time (which didn't seem to block all the damage anyway), you die and have to do the entire battle again.

Cheap? They'd turn their noses up at this in the game design Poundsaver, frankly. What makes it even worse is that there are tons of other bosses who explode at the end, but Ryu calmly walks away from those without any interaction from you.

The balance of the game, of course, ultimately comes down to opinion. It's our view that NG2 regularly fails to provide the same level of combat challenge that NG did, instead stooping to cheap shots at the player's health bar in order to create the artificial impression of difficulty. There will undoubtedly be huge NG fans who disagree, and we should add that even if we think this drops the game's quality well below that of its predecessor, it's still hugely compelling to play, as long as you've got a fairly dogged persistence and high tolerance for frustration.

What aren't a matter of opinion, however, are the technical flaws. Frame-rate is a persistent issue, and while a little slowdown can actually look quite cool in places, it's not so great when it prevents you from pulling off a move in combat or just makes the whole display laggy. This is especially noticeable if you're running in 1080p - we had to drop our 360's display back to 1080i to get the game to run at an acceptable frame-rate, and this on a brand new 360 running a boxed copy of the PAL release. There are other minor bugs, too. We occasionally got stuck on the legs of the larger boss creatures, and couldn't move around until the boss moved and we popped out.

The biggest issue, though, is one that's been around since the first Ninja Gaiden on Xbox and hasn't improved in all that time: the camera. NG2's camera is awful - really, speechlessly awful. It's manually controlled with the right thumb-stick, while the right trigger provides you with the ability to centre it behind you, but in a game this fast and intense, the fact that the camera has no intelligence of its own is as crippling to you as Ryu's limb-severing attacks are to his enemies. It'll happily sit there showing you the wall next to you while a boss pounds on you from off-screen, and it makes the game's otherwise-excellent platforming sections (a huge improvement on the previous game's, with definite cues from Prince of Persia) very painful at times. Worst of all, it's not just bad, it's buggy and bad; on several occasions it became stuck behind scenery and showed us a close-up of a wall while we got smashed into kibbles.

All of which is mainly depressing because Ninja Gaiden 2 is still a good game. It's beautiful, cinematic and full of fantastically detailed enemies, gorgeous animations and incredibly fast, exciting combat. But while it's good, it's not quite great. It's marred by technical problems and Team Ninja's previously perfect balancing act just isn't in evidence in major sections. There's too much trial-and-error gameplay, too many cheap shots, and not enough real challenge. There's a difference between kicking your arse until you learn from it, and kicking your arse until you get lucky, and Ninja Gaiden 2 fails that crucial test all too often.