NINJA GAIDEN: Ragebound

I reached World 3-4, and for now I have decided to stop here. What the game does well, it does very well. Getting into its rhythm feels really satisfying. The problem is that losing that rhythm is frustrating enough to completely overshadow the good parts. It feels a bit like painting something you are really proud of, then making one small mistake that ruins the whole flow. Technically, the run is still recoverable, but the feeling of failure sticks. And when that happens every 20 seconds, it becomes exhausting. A lot of the game’s challenge comes from special enemies that force you to react instantly and understand their gimmick on the spot. Sometimes that works fine. Other times, it feels unfair in a very different way. You might have to hit a fast-moving enemy that actively tries to avoid you, unlike most of the other enemies in the game. If you miss it, or use the wrong attack color, there is no way to recover the opportunity. Your punishment is to stop, charge a special attack, and lose health in the process. At the other end of the spectrum, the game sometimes expects you to do... nothing. A special enemy shows up, you assume it is the thing you have to deal with, and by the time you are already improvising a backup plan, the actual solution finally arrives from off screen. Sometimes you simply have to wait up to two seconds for another enemy to appear behind you, then hit it with the correct attack color. Those two seconds sound insignificant, but they completely clash with the pace the rest of the game teaches you. By the time the enemy finally appears, I have already convinced myself that I missed the intended solution and started adapting. Instead of rewarding quick thinking, the game punishes it by asking you to hesitate. And eventually, the punishment gets harsher. Some of these sequences can kill you outright, no matter how much health you have left, simply because the level decided that this was the appropriate punishment at that exact moment. The result is the same every time: either you perform the expected solution perfectly, or you waste time trying to work around it. I have a deep hatred for die and retry games, and this one is not quite on that level for me, but it still ends up producing the same feeling. Follow the developer’s instruction perfectly, or spend your time trying to force a creative solution to a problem that was clearly designed to be answered in one specific way. Sure, sometimes you can clear a screen by parrying your way through it, but that feels less like solving the puzzle and more like sidestepping it entirely.