When I first bought my Xbox 360, one of the first games I picked up for it was Ninety-Nine Nights. As a very vocal fan of Dynasty Warriors and all things hack n’ slash, the game looked like a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it failed due to a ridiculous difficulty based upon cheap attacks rather than well designed challenges, dreary controls, and endless reams of boring cutscenes.
I was surprised it ever got a sequel, but I held out hope that N3II would be an improvement. After all, someone who likes Dynasty Warriors isn’t hard to please. A demo is on Xbox Live right now and I took it for a test drive to see if the game had improved at all over the last one.
Guess what… it’s exactly the same!
At first, the game looked pretty badass. Graphically gorgeous and full of really cool character designs, the game plays like a fairly solid hack n’ slash title. Playing as the dual-wielding character available in the demo, I was able to cut enemies in half, perform some simple combos, and unleashed a bunch of devastating special moves. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, everything went sour about five minutes in when an ambush party appeared and I was attacked by some yellow-armored bastard who could power through every single attack I landed, and unleashed unavoidable, unblockable, ludicrously powerful magic attacks. What? I was shortly killed after the enemy spammed his magic attack over and over and over again and then I was shot by some prick with an arrow.
Playing again, I managed to avoid the ambush and thus didn’t get pasted by one of the cheapest enemies I’ve ever seen. I destroyed three summoning stones to stop the enemies spawning and made my way to the checkpoint, only to be accosted by a giant pink troll. You know how they made him fun to fight? The pink troll can ignore all your attacks, just like the yellow cunt with the magic bullshit. He also seems to take forever to beat, as I pounded on him for ages, and unleashed two special attacks. He shrugged all this off and continued to pound me with barely telegraphed attacks. Then his mates all joined in.
Then I died, said “fuck this” turned it off.
Game of the year!
