|
|
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Jack of all trades, master of none, 2 Jan 2009
Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars
To be right up front, I wasn't a fan of the previous Ubisoft developed Naruto game, Rise of a Ninja. It had some impressively ambitious ideas for an anime based title, but the execution fell flat on practically every front, with awkward, stunted controls, a limited, extremely poorly put together retread of the first half of the original Naruto's storyline that excised massive amounts of story and plot and many characters in a manner that rendered a lot of the story nonsensical. This was then topped off by one of the worst combat systems I've come across in a beat em up. The end result obviously was a game that could only be described as 'not good'(To put it kindly).
Broken Bond DOES attempt to address many of the faults with Rise of a Ninja, but does so in an extremely half hearted manner and also introduces some new annoyances to the mix.
Covering the second half of the Naruto story, the game plays more or less identically to Rise of a Ninja(Sadly with the same unresponsive, unfriendly controls), but provides a larger play area for the game and a slightly longer story mode(Took me just under 9 hours to finish) to explore, with the best move made being to allow you to see and play the parts of the story that don't centre around Naruto himself.
Playing as numerous characters as the story goes along, the game does manage to cover a lot of ground with the story, but again it excises a lot of plot and changes even more of it completely(often to remove certain key characters from the plot entirely or completely simplify some major character's back stories). While this may not be a huge issue if you don't already know the plot(If you're not a Naruto fan already though, you're not likely to be playing this), it is very distracting if you're a fan and you're wondering where the hell the likes of Shizune, Iruka, Hinata, Asuma, and others are and why on Earth Gaara, Temari and Kankuro have their entire role in this part of the series cut down to a cameo where they don't even fully appear on camera. This sort of story butchering may have been passable if you were playing a straight beat em up title like the recent Ultimate Ninja Storm, but when it occurs in what is billed as an involved, extensive adventure title, it is a lot harder to overlook.
Gameplay wise, I have mentioned the unfriendly controls. During the platforming sequences, the characters feel sluggish to move, the jumping doesn't respond quickly enough, and the use of the characters' powers is a repetitive sequence of timed button presses at pre set locations throughout the game, with no scope at all given for free use of abilities(Beyond wall running perhaps) to explore the world. It all feels far too scripted to be a truly fun platformer.
The fighting, again, is awful, with slow moving one on one battles(With the ability to switch characters mid fight added) amounting to little more than button bashing and special moves which again trigger the dreaded timed button press mini games that this game really uses way too much. The combat is too slow and sluggish and doesn't replicate character powers well enough to make each character fell 'unique' enough. Online combat suffers not only for these issues, but also for the massive amounts of lag the game has, making the multiplayer often unplayable whenever I tried it.
Visually the game is good though, with colourful characters and areas with a lot of impressive detail in their design. It looks great, despite some frame rate issues and poor facial animation and lip synching with the voices.
Speaking of voices, while the game does give the option of either having the english or japanese voice actors, the japanese voice setting is riddled with bugs, with the character voices seeming to switch constantly between english and japanese during combat.
I don't want to keep crapping all over this game, as it does try to do a lot of interesting things and it is the most varied and extensive Naruto game to date. However this doesn't count for much when everything it does it doesn't do very well.
Fans may get something out of it, but overall, there was simply too much wrong with this game to make it a recommendable title for me.
Must try harder ubisoft.
|