3.5/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of NINJA GAIDEN 4.

Ninja Gaiden 4 was my introduction to the series, I know me starting on the 4th entry probably isn't the best idea, but to my knowledge this feels more like a soft-reboot of the series than anything. While I can't compare this to the previous games, this very much feels like a Platinum Games title in almost every aspect. For those that don't know, Team Ninja developed the first three games back in the 2000s and early 2010s. However after the team released the recent Nioh games, they handed the development of the 4th game over to Platinum, so while Team Ninja was involved with the development of 4, from what I've read their involvement on it was minimal. From what little knowledge I have of this series, Platinum Games took what worked about the previous games and gave it the combat style they're known for and in my opinion, it worked wonders. To start with what I already mentioned previously, Ninja Gaiden 4's combat is hectic and satisfying. If you're a fan of Platinum Games, you'll pretty much know already how the combat will feel and if you'd like it or not. It's not overly complex which I very much appreciated, a lot of games in this genre tend to add moves that are way too hard for the average person to master and I appreciate this game's more streamlined approach while also leaving those crazy moves there for the people who want to master them. This game's combat is also visually satisfying, the visual feedback you receive after pulling off a crazy move is one of the best feelings this game has to offer. The gore as well is definitely a huge plus for me as it makes the combat that much more satisfying. The enemy variety is also pretty decent, I hate games like this where you feel like you're fighting the same enemy over and over again and luckily this doesn't fall into that category. The bosses too are extremely fun and challenging which I appreciated, don't expect Fromsoft level difficulty but do expect restarting over and over again for some of them. Unfortunately I do have quite a few complaints with this game that held it back for me. Now I know Ninja Gaiden isn't particularly known for it's crazy story, but the story in this is really bad. Usually I can put up with video games having bad stories, but this decides to focus on it's bad story a lot more than it needed to and as a result makes a lot of the later sections less impactful. This also plays into my other complaint, which is how padded out some levels and the story feel. I won't get into spoilers but half of this game's levels feel like they only exist just to add more game. For example there's a part where you're in this windy area with lots of bridges and I counted a total of two times the bridge decided to fall on you just before you're about to reach the next boss making you "take the long way" multiple times. This isn't a huge problem for the first part of the game, as the combat is really fun to make up for it. But you definitely feel it more during the Ryu sections where the game just decides to reuse enemies and levels instead of creating new environments. The Ryu sections were really disappointing as you could almost remove them entirely and the game would barely change. Overall though I loved my time with Ninja Gaiden 4, if you have game pass especially I highly recommend checking this out as I got a lot more out of this than I was expecting.