Xbox 360
'Visceral action game' are the words slathered all over the press material for NGII. Even after the briefest play, it is clear that visceral action is everywhere in this game. Hoardes of minions attack brandishing shiny pointy deadly things - only to lose their precious life and limbs time after time to your swirling Ninja based fury. If there is one thing NGII has, it is visceral action. Indeed, it's hard to think of what else you could want from a game, when there is so much visceral action on offer anyway.
A decent story for example. This clearly took a backseat to all the visceral-ness. The 'plot' kicks off with some big boobed lass asking after you (the last of the dragon ninjas - obviously) only to be kidnapped by ninja spiders (obvisouly). Then you must traverse a the city, beating the crap out of hoard after hoard of underlings before fighting a giant spider. When you do this and get boob girl back, she says something about something about the end of the world. And then you repeat this whole process (with slightly difefrent minions/bosses) until the game ends. Probably. Its hard to care about the inescapable cutscenes due to the terrible voice acting and animation. But who needs that anyway when there is so much visceral action going around.
Said action is helped along by the large array of weapons at your disposal, well, the array anyway. Swords, staffs, shurikens are all represented - it's just a bit of a shame that there doesn't appear to be that much difference between the weapons. In fact the same could be said about the fighting. In a visceral aciton game like this, it's supposed to be all about the skillz and the strategy in any of the numerous fights against 15 or so bastards at once, which occur with alarming frequency around the city. But it is entirely possible to get through the levels with average button mashing skills. Sure there could be some skillz involved if you want the really high scores and such, but you don't need any. Which sucks the fun away. Hugely.
On top of all this, NGII is somewhat repeptetive. Ok the action is all visceral and whatnot, but it's visceral in a corridor, visceral on a rooftop and then back inside for some more action against another wodge of minion. Rinse and repeat until you find the boss.
Which is fine, as there are so many online options here. You can upload your scores to a leaderboard to see who is the most visceral and... er... well theres loads of action in single player so you don't really need any more do you?
It feels like NGII has fallen over its own promo line. Neglecting the vast majority of the game in favour of intense fighting and gore. Which it does have and is fun, for a while. But the lack of any real challenge aside from some absurdly out of step boss battles along with the same same nature of levels/weapons/characters all make for a game best avoided. Unless you really need severed limbs flying all around you. And if that's the case you should probably seek some professional help.