Ninja Gaiden Sigma [PS3]

One fault that we had with the original game that was greatly addressed here are the sections where you were required to fight a seemingly endless amount of enemies to advance. Areas like the Archives were especially bad about this, but they've luckily been removed from all required sections. There are sections where this will happen, but in each of these cases it's for some sort of bonus item. Unfortunately, you don't realize this until after you've spent all of your urns while fending off nearly 100 enemies, but at least they are optional, whether you know it or not.

The Mission mode from Black returns once you've beaten the game, as do interchangeable costumes and the ability to upload your high Karma score. Rachel gets her own set of missions this time around which is nice, though as mentioned previously, she's not as fun as Ryu. The Mission mode is locked prior to beating the game for a reason, however - it's extremely difficult and intended to truly test your abilities. If you want to practice for those, once you've beaten the game you'll also have access to a harder difficulty option, which is paramount to self-torture for all but the exceptionally talented players.

Visually, Ninja Gaiden Sigma is easily one of the cleanest-looking games we've seen this generation, with extremely sharp visuals all around. Texture resolution is great, character detail is fantastic and it runs at a blistering 60fps even at 1080p. The environments look good, though since most of the geometric content has been moved over from the Xbox title it's not mind-blowing in any way. The same holds true for the lighting. Characters feature self-shadowing, which while subtle does look nice, but the environments use the same lighting techniques as the previous iterations. There's a time or two in the game where Ryu's dynamic shadows get cast onto the ground where the shadow from a platform you're standing on isn't cast and makes things appear messed up, though you really need to look for these instances and you'll probably never really notice them during actual gameplay.

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