There are three gameplay modes available here - action mode, movie mode and a variable movie mode. Team Ninja games have traditionally focused on sleek, polished visuals, a fast frame-rate and fluid animation but Nioh takes things further by offering players a selection of options to tailor your experience. You'll run across a handful of low resolution assets here and there but the overall appearance is solid.

Character models feel like an evolution of what we've come to know from Team Ninja with rounded edges and clean lines. Texture work is solid with plenty of detail slathered across each scene while specular highlights allow for dynamic lighting to play nicely off the detailed terrain. The rain-swept village encountered early on fills the screen with droplets which, using a screen-space technique, take on light from surrounding torches and attacks. Nioh simply oozes with atmosphere thanks to stylised lighting and weather effects. Large, rocky surfaces undulate convincingly while fully modeled tiles make up the ground on which you walk. Rather than relying on features such as parallax occlusion mapping, for instance, Nioh instead adds surface detail through sheer geometric density taking a page from Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne, in a sense. In many ways, it feels like an evolution of what Team Ninja started with the 2004 iteration of Ninja Gaiden - sharp, clean lines and detailed texture work combine with fast, fluid animation to great effect. It won't leave your jaw on the floor by any means, but over time, it leaves a strong impression. This is, simply put, Team Ninja's return to form.Īt first glance, Nioh is a visually conservative game - one that pushes modern post-processing effects and cutting-edge rendering techniques off to the side in favour of a more reserved presentation. What we have in the end is a dark, brutally difficult action game that combines the best elements of Ninja Gaiden and Dark Souls into one remarkable package. All three games have undergone a significant transformation since then but perhaps none more than Nioh. We're, of course, talking about Final Fantasy 15 and The Last Guardian - two games that, along with Nioh, were first announced more than a decade ago. The last two months have been remarkable for fans of Japanese games and with the release of Nioh for PlayStation 4, the trinity of highly anticipated, long in-development games is now complete.

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