Ninety-Nine Nights [X360]

You feel like you can take on the world, kid? Then grab the biggest sword you can find and tackle up to 1,000 enemies at once in Ninety-Nine Nights for the Xbox 360. Hack, slash, and maybe even block a few times as you rack up an unheard-of kill count -- all in the name of revenge. Sounds pretty sweet, right? Well, it is...to a point.

Ninety-Nine Nights (heretofore N3) brings the Dynasty Warriors style of massive melee combat to a truly next-gen battlefield. Now, some of you may be saying that Dynasty Warriors is already on Xbox 360, but this isn't just some prettied-up port. The company behind Kingdom Under Fire -- which added some squad-based commanding to the formula on Xbox -- teams with industry darling Q! Entertainment for a brand new, from-the-ground-up take on large-scale hack 'n slashers.

The good news is Ninety-Nine Nights furthers these types of games in almost every way. You want a better story? It injects some moral fiber into your button-mashing diet, as you realize that mass genocide may not actually be the best answer for every conflict. You want more enemies? The game fills the screen with them, and our mention of 1,000 baddies simultaneously is no exaggeration. How about more moves and control? Nights has got your back there as well, with two attack buttons, two special move types, and a user-controlled camera.

So, what's the bad news? Despite all these improvements, Ninety-Nine Nights just isn't much more fun than similar games that came before it. While there are more combos, items, and specials, after a few hours, boredom will still set in as you're doing basically the same thing ad nauseam.

Enter a map, dispatch a few hundred goblins or orcs or whatever, then walk a few feet and get ambushed. Mission objectives rarely require more than wiping out anything not under your command, so each stage feels like a rerun. Nights' AI relies on strength in numbers rather than intelligence. When there's an exception, it seems more like your attacks are just passing through the baddie rather than him expertly fighting against you.