Ninety-Nine Nights review

If you have a 360 to hand, take a moment to look at the blue button. Can you imagine sitting, holding it and pressing that button thousands and thousands of times? If so, this game is for you. If not, you might as well stop reading here. This is a game built solely on pressing X. And Y, occasionally.

Ninety Nine Nights is the Q Entertainment attempt at (politely put) ripping off Dynasty Warriors, but without the complicated bits. Hundreds and hundreds of enemies attack you, you retaliate by pressing X. Hundreds more come, and you retaliate by pressing X and sometimes Y. It's not complicated stuff.

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Technically, there are other buttons and a little bit more to the game. Emphasis is put on combinations of X and Y get swords twirling as well as jumping around. More interestingly, killing enemy after enemy gives you orbs which allows you to launch special attacks, activated (amazingly!) by pressing combinations of X and Y. Lots of games are easy to mock for being simplistic, but this one deserves everything it gets. In a vain attempt to avoid such criticism, there are items to collect and then choose between to alter your damage levels and so on and levelling up gives new combination attacks (ie. Pressing X and Y in a different order), but you'd have to be quite slow to be tricked into believing that is depth. In case you are that slow, that isn’t depth.

There is no competition coming from the enemies either. While there might be hundreds, thousands even, coming at you at once not a single one of them is capable of fighting for themselves. Two sweeps of a sword and a handful will die, and then more will walk into the gap left by the dead. The closest the enemies get to tactics is putting archers on a hillside a little distance away. It's mind-numbing stuff. Oh, and you occasionally have an army to help you but they are as useless as the enemies. Stand and watch your allies fighting the enemy is like watching slapstick comedy. Useless.

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Graphically a game this simple really has to shine, and in some cases it does. Watching a vast number of enemies storming down a hill is an awesome experience. Getting into the middle of them and once you are toe-to-toe with them, bashing them around and watching them tumble into each other is almost as impressive. But if you stop bashing X for a couple of seconds and start looking at them you can't help but notice that they are all so similar. 90% of enemies in each wave are identical to each other, with only a couple of animations trying in vain to make them seem unique, but they are never believable. They are impressive only in numbers and in no other way.

And aside from the masses eager to run into your sword, the rest of the game veers erratically from looking great to terrible. The actual stages are barren, flat and lifeless. The first few stages are the worst, but none of them would make you think you were playing on a 360 rather than a Dreamcast game. On top of that though, sword swipes and in particular special moves fill the screen with pretty colours and lighting effects but it’s a thin veil placed over a broadly unimpressive background. Special mention has to go to the unbelievably dull character design, the descriptions of Tolkien’s creations seem to have been copied word for word. Woefully unoriginal.

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Technically there is a reason for all this, but it's as shallow as you'd expect and no reason to urge you to play. To simplify an already simplistic story, there is a big bad guy who broke a crystal. That action makes some goblins flip out, start destroying things and generally cause a ruckus. Unimpressed, humans decide that the best response is to also flip out and kill thousands of goblins. After that you kill the big bad guy and...well. You might as well be left with something.

The interesting part is that you get to see the conflict from various different angles as you switch between characters. While none of the stories get deep enough to care about them it does give a wider view of the story and is an impressive method of storytelling. It gives the feel of reading various sources when researching history, but with so little being told from each angle makes it feel like maybe it would have been better just to do it in a more traditional manner. The CG FMV that presents the stories is fabulous to look at, but you can't help but feel it was a waste of time for whoever spent their life making it look so good.

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Believe it or not, there are some other really bad bits that haven’t been mentioned yet. The boss battles for a start, are dire. They boil down to standing around, waiting for an animation to finish and then (guess what!) bashing that blue button a few times while hoping they don’t block your attacks. And you have to hope as you simply can’t tell if they will or not as they can even block attacks with their back turned to you. And of course, if they hit you, you'll die almost instantly. Great. That brings about another terrible point - dying. Checkpoints come twenty or thirty minutes apart and if you die, it's back to the start. No saving mid-level or restarting or anything modern like that.

And yet after all that, coming home from work and just sitting in a chair and bashing X for thirty minutes while killing thousands of foul creatures with little effort is sort of relaxing. It's simple, it's old fashioned and while it's frankly pathetic that they think it makes a next generation game, it doesn't mean it isn't sort of fun in the same way Golden Axe was years ago. It’s boring, dull and yet still somehow oddly compelling. But a word of warning to other developers reading this – the fact that this is still sort of enjoyable doesn’t mean that we want more games like this. We don’t.