Nioh is an action role-playing video game developed by Team Ninja for the PlayStation 4.It was released worldwide in February 2017, and was published by Koei Tecmo in Japan and Sony Interactive Entertainment internationally. Beginning development in 2004 as a multimedia project based on an unfinished Akira Kurosawa script, it went through multiple revisions over the following eight years as general producer Kou Shibusawa was dissatisfied with the result.Team Ninja was given the project, and the subsequent development lasted four years. The story was based on the life of historic Western samurai William Adams, although it was embellished with supernatural elements. Development information was sporadic until 2015, when it was reintroduced as a PlayStation 4 exclusive but after countless delays and the game going silent for a while, has Koei Tecmo managed to deliver something beyond expectations? Let's find out.

STORY:7/10

The game's main protagonist is William, a blonde-haired Irishman ( Japanese Geralt) who arrives in Japan in pursuit of an enemy. While there, he crosses paths with Tokugawa Ieyasu and his ninja servant Hattori Hanzo, forming an alliance against both William's enemy and the yokai infesting Japan. William is trained in combat by Yagyu Munetoshi, Hozoin In'ei and Marume Nagayoshi (god these names). The main antagonist is Edward Kelley, a Westerner driving the conflict using his dark alchemical abilities.

GAMEPLAY: 9/10

Nioh’s gameplay is divided into stages instead of a long continuous open world. Each stage has a small description of what is happening and your objective in the stage with a short intro and end cut-scene. Main missions are accompanied by sub, side and twilight missions, with sub and side missions acting like the games side-quests and twilight missions being harder versions of the main mission. Even though the game is broken down into missions, each mission is considerably long with per mission taking you roughly 30-40 minutes to complete depending on your skill, how much you explore and grind to level-up.

As soon as you start your first journey, some of you might get the feeling of familiarity since most of the Gameplay is surprisingly comparable to the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne developed by From Software. Although the gameplay is similar, it is only to a few fundamentals ie, menu functionality and zero assistance, assist your threat and approach with caution.

Combat is much faster than any souls games have ever been. Never in all my years of gaming have I played a game this well designed in the combats of a Samurai/ninja. Basically combat is divided into 3 different stances, High, Mid and Low stance. Each stance deals damage in different quantities with the name of each stance giving a you a rough idea of each damage input. What you have to be wary of during each stance is Ki consumption. Ki is your stamina meter in this game and combat is completely dependent on the Ki meter as well as dashing. Similar to the gears of war series’ ‘active reloading’ where perfectly timing your reloads gives the weapon a damage multiplier, Nioh has a system called ‘Ki pulse’, where perfectly timing and hitting the R1 button replenishes a certain portion of your Ki.

One or two parts where Nioh manages to fall short are in its habits of asset reuse and bosses. Each Main Mission is different in its own regards, but enemy variety is disappointingly limited. For the most part you fight same enemy types, only difference being that they are stronger and process different elemental damages. That too, only implies to the Mid-level enemies, low-level enemies are practically the same throughout the game.

Bosses are also to some degree a bit disappointing as no boss in the game is a memorable experience when compared to other games in the same field. I’ve personally noticed that all bosses have a pattern which is very easily exploitable.

VISUALS: 7/10

Before we talk about visuals, I would like to point out that Nioh provides players with three game modes they can choose from which are:

Action Mode

Movie Mode

Variable Mode

Action mode lowers the resolutions for a better frame-rate

Movie mode gives more priority to better image quality with sacrificing frame-rates

Variable mode deals with providing a standard 1080p and 4k resolution with an uncapped frame-rate on the regular PS4 and PS4 Pro respectively.

Talking about the visual fidelity of the game, Team Ninja opted to not use any fancy graphics rendering techniques you would see on most titles these days and instead went with a Brute force method. The results are very much satisfactory but not what we would see on most triple-A titles. One part where the Team deserves credit is with the game's lighting engine. The lighting mechanics are designed in a way that light reflecting from the walls or ground gives the game a much prettier tone and look which is very pleasing. Also, one thing I’ve personally noticed is that enemies at a distance tends to be animating at a much lower frame-rate when in Action Mode. Maybe that is how Team Ninja managed to maintain the almost steady 60fps.

AUDIO: 8/10

The general audio is great with decent voice work. There doesn't seem to be much of a dynamic system when it comes to audio tweaking options, other than the standards. A nice thing to commend Team Ninja for, is adding another layer of realism in the voice work, Japanese speak Japanese and William speaks English as he is from Britain. You don't have the weird situation where a man born and raised in Japan for all his life suddenly speaks English like he is an English.man. It certainly was a nice and unexpected touch from the game.

Overall Score:

 31/40

A 78% rating of approval

Conclusion

Nioh is definitely a great game with a few drawbacks. Now what comes to mind is whether Nioh will turn into a franchise and if so, when could we possibly see a sequel?

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Image Sources:

1. http://kotaku.com/nioh-the-kotaku-review-1792396906
2. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nioh-review/1900-6416611/
3. http://wccftech.com/nioh-developer-ps4-exclusive/