SHINOBI: Art of Vengeance Review Summary

Exceptional Gameplay Experience: Players consistently praise the game's solid, responsive, and satisfying gameplay, highlighting its fluid combat, enjoyable progression, and overall high quality. Many found it exhilarating and a true modern take on the genre, surpassing even the demo's promise.

Stunning Visuals and Art Style: The game's hand-drawn, cel-shaded art style, animations, and character designs are universally lauded as outstanding, distinct, and a pleasure to behold. Reviewers frequently describe the visuals as magnificent, gorgeous, and a highlight of the game.

Fluid and Satisfying Combat: Combat is consistently described as excellent, unique, and immediately satisfying, with great feel and rich derivations. Players enjoy the fluid movements, impactful feedback, and the exhilarating experience of mastering combos.

Outstanding 2D Side-Scrolling Action: The game is celebrated as a top-tier 2D side-scrolling action game, offering refreshing combat, fast-paced action, and excellent controls. It successfully blends modern combat with retro platforming, evoking nostalgia while delivering a high-quality contemporary experience.

High Polish and Smooth Performance: The game is highly polished, with excellent sound design, voice acting, and smooth, fast-paced gameplay. Players reported no bugs, glitches, or crashes, indicating a robust and well-optimized experience.

Frustrating Platforming & Map Design: Players consistently report that platforming sections are poorly designed, frustrating, and overly prevalent, often leading to tedious backtracking and severe penalties for failure. The map design exacerbates these issues with poor guidance, lack of essential features, and frequent bugs.

Poor Map Functionality: The in-game map is heavily criticized for critical bugs, such as the player icon getting stuck or not displaying correctly. It also lacks basic features like dragging/moving and clear guidance, making navigation difficult and frustrating.

Annoying UI/UX Elements: Players are frustrated by mandatory, unskippable animations for switches, lack of clear indicators for switch functions, and inconvenient default keybindings that cannot be remapped. The parachute mechanics are also criticized for being unintuitive.

Repetitive & Simple Bosses: Boss encounters are described as lacking variety in movesets and overall design. Many players found them to be too simple, especially in earlier chapters, leading to a less engaging combat experience.

Limited Combat & Enemy Variety: The game suffers from a lack of diverse enemy types and repetitive combat encounters. Players desire more complex enemy AI and a greater challenge, suggesting a need for a New Game+ hard mode.

Metroidvania-style Level Design: The game blends Metroidvania and belt-scroll action, featuring chapter-based 2D platforming levels with light Metroidvania elements. Players explore large stages, requiring new abilities to access previously unreachable areas and encouraging revisiting for full completion.

Deep Combo Combat System: Combat is combo-focused, emphasizing shield breaking and 'ninja kills' with agile moves and special techniques. The system allows for many combos, similar to Devil May Cry, and includes boss fights.

Varied Platforming Mechanics: The game features diverse platforming sections, including grappling hook segments, wall climbing, double jumps, and dashes. These mechanics are introduced progressively, often one per level, and contribute to smooth obstacle traversal.

Adjustable Difficulty & Modes: The game offers adjustable difficulty settings, an assist mode, and extra modes like Boss Rush and Arcade. Some brutal challenge rooms, however, are unaffected by accessibility settings.

Secrets and Collectibles: Levels are designed with many secrets, hidden areas, and collectibles such as combat points, treasure chests, and orbs. These encourage thorough exploration and often require specific abilities obtained later.

Excellent Performance & Optimization: Players consistently report that the full game runs smoothly at a stable 60FPS, even on devices like the Steam Deck and high-end PCs. The optimization is frequently praised as excellent, indicating a significant improvement over any previous versions.

Demo Performance Issues: The game's demo was noted for having severe lag issues, which contrasts sharply with the positive feedback for the full game. This suggests that performance has been significantly improved since the demo's release.

Highly Recommended Game: Many players enthusiastically recommend the game, citing its enjoyable gameplay, good value for money, and appeal to fans of similar titles like Hollow Knight, Ori, and classic Shinobi games. It's seen as a refreshing action experience.

Challenging Platforming Sections: Players note that some platforming sections, particularly those involving grappling hooks, are very difficult. A suggestion was made to add more save points in these challenging areas to improve the experience.

Positive Reinterpretation of Classic: The game is praised as a successful reinterpretation of a classic, respecting its roots while offering a fresh future. It's considered an example of how remasters should be done.

Mixed Map Design Feedback: Feedback on map design is mixed, with one player giving a low score due to it, while another noted a map bug that was resolved by restarting. A strategic tip was given to ignore certain rooms early on.

Performance Issues Reported: Some players experienced lag, especially at level 2, which impacted their ability to play. They suggest waiting for optimization patches or considering a refund if issues persist.

Limited feedback provided: Several clusters contained very sparse or non-actionable feedback, such as reviewer plans, personal preferences, or irrelevant details. These points offer minimal constructive insight for development.

Game length is adequate: Players report completing the main story in about 9.5 to 15 hours, with a full collection taking longer. This length is considered comparable to other games in the genre.

Minimap bug needs fix: Players encountered a minimap bug that could be temporarily resolved by quitting to the desktop or restarting the game. This suggests a recurring technical issue.

Positive demo experience: A player spent 6 hours in the demo, finding it covered the first area well and provided access to challenging parts, indicating a positive initial impression.

Map improvement requested: A player expressed a desire for developers to improve the game's map, indicating potential usability or clarity issues.