Tenchu: Fatal Shadows Critic Reviews

If you’ve never played a Tenchu game before, this is definitely not the one to start with.

One thing that fans of the Tenchu series will enjoy is the enemies have increased AI. You can't just hide in a bunch of bushes and be "invisible" to enemies anymore.

By far the most useful addition though is the ability to pick up bodies so you can hide them. It's a simple little skill that should have been available all along... and now it is.

All you really need to know is that Fatal Shadows is the best game in the series to date, and although there are a few considerable drawbacks, playing this game is a sneaky good time.

9 / 7 / 8 / 7 - 31 silver

She's a good old dog but hard pressed to learn new tricks.

I'm a little disappointed that Tenchu isn't pushing the genre forward like "Splinter Cell" and "Metal Gear Solid" have.

Not only fails to enhance the genre as a whole, but also fails to offer any serious improvements over its predecessor.

But this latest version of the game suffers from the same problems pretty much since the beginning. What was once tolerable due to technology constraints simply doesn't cut it in the era of "Snake Eater" and "Chaos Theory."

This game might make a few halfhearted attempts to try to rope new players into the Tenchu fold, between its original story and its tutorial mode, but the gameplay itself is cumbersome, and the presentation isn't going to be good enough to hold most players' interest when the gameplay fails to.

What happened? The previous games in the Tenchu series were really good, but the developers of this game really dropped the ball.

When the rose petals fly across the screen after such a bloody intro, you know Tenchu: Fatal Shadows will be an extreme, if somewhat flawed, mixture of beauty and death.

Sneaky ninjas do not even have to sneak. Someone has been lazy when making this sub-standard game.

Few games can capture the sense of being in the hunt so well, and by degrees few games can disappoint so much when this sense is lost to wrangling with the camera or gawkish, unpredictable controls shackling your weightlessness.

It might as well have been published by AT&T, because this is the most phoned-in sequel this side of a football game.

If you’ve played any of the previous Tenchu outings you have already seen most of what is in this game.

Until K2 pull their finger out and bring the game engine into the 21st Century, Tenchu will be remembered as a Playstation classic with a load of all too similar sequels.

This game itself would be fine if this was 1998 but considering Tenchu: Fatal Shadows sits between games with a similar mission and a more up to date feel I would say leave it on the shelf.

Besides the higher-resolution visuals, you'd be hard-pressed to tell this apart from the PlayStation game that kicked off the series nearly seven years ago.

A number of flaws kill the game's flow, namely a particularly atrocious camera, a weak lock-on system, a frustrating lack of checkpoints, and poor enemy A.I.