REVIEW: MARK OF THE NINJA

PUBLISHER: Klei Entertainment / Microsoft Studios 2012

PLATFORM: PC, Xbox 360, Linux, OS X

REVIEW: PC

Genre:Action, Stealth, Platform

About the plot

The game begins when the Hisumo ninja clan is been attacked by unknown enemy and player is awaken from sleep by ninja named Ora. They held your Sensei and other ninjas captured and you must free them.

Soon it turns out that people behind this attack is led by Count Karajan and his troops.

Your Sensei Azai send you and Ora to kill Karajan. But soon you learn that there is something bigger behind this attack.

Game itself

Mark of the ninja is 2D stealth action side scroller game, where direct action is not often key to success. You must use deception and hiding in the shadows, if you want to success on this game.

Your character cannot take much damage and is killed easily. So this restrict much of the direct conformation with your enemies.  So you must kill your enemies with successfully executed special kills from the shadows or with old fashioned stab with your sword from behind.

You can use hand-to-hand combat, but your enemies take some beating, before they can be killed.

This is also last thing you want do because you get killed very easily. You can also run for it and escape from scene.

One of my favorite kill is, when you can hang your enemy to lamp post or drop their body in front of another enemy. They will get panicked and try to shoot anything that moves, sometimes they manage to kill their friends when panicked.

Game can be very frustrated time to time when you get constantly killed, but when you finally success to avoid or kill your enemies and go forward and this can be very rewarding experience.

Game can be hard/tricky. but thanks for many checkpoints you don't forced to begin too far from where you died last time. So this is is not a so big dead that it first sounds.


After completing a level, game give you points for your action and reward you for like not killing or not get caught by any enemy and there is also some other challenges that changes from level to level.

There is also Steam leaderboards, where you can compare your score with another gamers.

Game has 38 Steam achievements you to get.

Visuals and stealth action.

But more than graphics, i was impressed by how visuals are done in this game. Game shows what your character sees and what your enemies see or where they are going.

Good example is when you try to distract your enemies by creating some noise, like throwing your knife to gong. You can see how far it will sounds and does your enemy hear it at all. There is nothing more annoying, than when you try to hide from your enemies, and you aren't sure if they can on cannot see you or do they got super "spiderman senses" and spot you unfairly.

Now you can easily read these visual hints and plan your actions according to it.

This is good example how can visuals support game play. Here you can see how far and who hears when you throw dagger to gong.

Final thoughts and do i recommend this game ?

I am not huge fan of platforming or stealth games in general, but i had much fun to play it.

Game can be quite hard, but it is still very rewarding and i was enjoying this game a lot.

I died many times in this game, but due many checkpoints it wasn't so big deal and when you finally managed to get out of that situation, you feel satisfaction. But most of time i was to blame for dying not that game is too hard.

Visual indication for what your enemies see and hear was one of the main point that i liked in this game. Also when you outsmarted your enemies or killed them from shadows without being detected was very fun.

So my final opinion is. I highly recommend it. It is very reasonable priced title.

More information about game is found: http://www.markoftheninja.com/