Tenchu Z

As far as ninja action games go, the Tenchu series is a bit of an odd duck. It doesn’t have the fantastical, fast-paced action (not to mention insane difficulty) of the Ninja Gaiden games. Instead, the series approaches things a bit more methodically, requiring you to utilize stealth and realistic tools in order to proceed through levels. Tenchu Z is the latest entry to the franchise, and the first one on the Xbox 360. However, from what is visible in the preview build, the game isn’t exactly the next-gen boost that you’d hope for from the series, offering up some fairly modest improvements over its predecessors. That is not to say that the game doesn’t offer some great new elements, as it definitely does.

The first immediately noticeable addition to the game is that you can now create your own character to play as. You can choose between a male or female character, what they wear, what their face looks like, as well as your sidekick. However, the customization options aren’t very fleshed out, as you can only pick from some predetermined options.

The series has always had more to do with Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid than Ninja Gaiden or Shinobi, and this entry solidifies this more in several key ways. You now have a sound meter that helps you determine how loud you’re being (enemies are better at picking you out if you make a lot of noise). If your sound meter is getting out of control, then you can adjust your movements accordingly in order to make less noise.

Another interesting addition to the stealth formula is smell. If you fall into a cesspool or kill too many enemies (hence drenching yourself in their blood), you can begin to smell, making you an easy target for your foes to detect. In order to deal with this, you can either jump into some clean water, or use a scent neutralizer (kind of like “ninja Febreze”) to literally keep your enemies off of your scent.

However, there are still some issues that reared their ugly heads in the preview build of Tenchu Z. The missions were still fairly bland, requiring you to do fairly simplistic things - such as assassinations, item hunts and so on - without any real deviation. Also, the AI is pretty lousy, and will easily lose interest in you or just do generally buggy things. Hopefully this is something that can be cleaned up when the final game ships next month.

Graphically, the game still had a lot of ways to go. The environmental textures were pretty bland and didn’t really represent the graphical boost to the new hardware. The whole look benefited from the high-definition increase, but looked more like a juiced up PS2 game than a full-blown Xbox 360 game.

Tenchu Z is turning into a nice entry for the series, with some good (albeit fairly modest) improvements to the franchise as a whole. At this point, it didn’t really feel like a huge jump to next-gen, but it should be noted that this is only a preview build. Look for a full review when the game launches next month.