Gameplay
In Ninety-Nine Nights you task is surprisingly simple – beat the heck out of hundreds upon hundreds of enemies. This is a pure, hack and slash, button masher. Yes, it is stupifyingly simple, but it manages to be fun anyway. The controls are simple with just a jump button, standard and power attacks, and a special attack button you use when you charge up a special meter. Different combinations of the buttons result in many, many different combinations and as you play you constantly pick up upgrades that make you more powerful and grant you new moves.
The key to N3 is that even though you are just mashing buttons and doing the same sort of repetitive stuff over and over and over again, you are always seeing new and more impressive stuff which keeps you playing. On top of all of that, each of the different playable characters has a distinct fighting style with their own special moves and you have a game that manages to keep impressing you and compelling you to play despite it’s relative lack of features.
Graphics
The other thing that will grab and hold your attention is that the game is absolutely beautiful to look at. The characters are animated extremely well and are very detailed. Enemy designs are repeated over and over again, but when there are hundreds of goblins or other nasties onscreen at the same time you are more worried about saving your own skin than the fact you just sliced your way through 500 of the same character design. One of the best things about N3, and something that sets it apart from other brawler games of this type, is that the enemies don’t just pop up out of nowhere. You can see the huge enemy army massing from a long ways away which makes it all even more impressive when you finally get to them and start fighting. I can say with a fair bit of confidence that even when the gameplay starts to wear a little thin you’ll still be playing this just to see what crazy cool stuff you’ll see next. And that is a good thing.
Bottm Line
Ninety-Nine Nights is going to be a definite sleeper hit. It looks fantastic and plays surprisingly well and is going to catch quite a few people off guard. The only downside I can see is that it comes out right at the start of a huge Fall 2006 season for the Xbox 360 and it might get lost in the shuffle. Ignore the tepid response the game got in Japan (they hate the Xbox anyway) and give N3 a try. Check out the demo on the Xbox Live Marketplace. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
