Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge (Hands-On) (Wii U) Preview

The first thing I asked the attendant was "What difficulty setting is this on?" to which she replied "Demo Difficulty." Needless to say I was dead in two minutes; well, at least I got the controls down. The second time I got most of the way through the demo and I'm pleased to say that it was indeed the Ninja Gaiden we know and love. No simplified effort here; it was fast-paced, fluid and brutal in all the right ways. Staying still in this game gets you killed fast, whilst dodging and attacking is the only way to clear out relentless foes, with this being done with a variety of different weapons, although the demo only featured three of them; Katana, Double Katana and Bow. In terms of controls, this wasn't the sort of game that was trying to show off what the Game Pad could do and was played interchangeably with the Control Pad Pro (which is actually smaller than expected, but still very comfortable -- I can see it being the best controller for fighters courtesy of an impressively sized, perfect D-pad) and focuses on quick button presses to bring about Ryu's Hyabusa drop and to slide around the map like a mad-man dodging all manner of projectiles and enemies.

After hitting a certain milestone in combat, players can unleash a fury move that pretty much levels the playing field of enemies, and is more often than not a saving grace for getting out of the tight situations that happen frequently. Outside of combat, Ryu is as acrobatic as would be expected, scaling walls a lá Prince of Persia and generally being a badass with shurikens and finding the many collectables, and health points.  All of this the game pulls without a hitch, the controls are as tight as you would expect them to be on either controller. Like with most Third Party titles I played on Wii U, the visuals had taken a huge hit. All the motions were there and everything flowed beautifully, to the point that you could hit a person so hard that their arms flew off in a bloody mess, but the textures and edges needed a considerable amount of refining. Edges were blurry and lacked a healthy dose of anti-aliasing, and some of the visuals looked a bit bland, though that could have been down to the desert setting, admittedly.