Review: Mark of the Ninja

Before playing it, I had heard good things about Mark of the Ninja, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it exceeded even my initially high expectations.  The game starts out with you as a ninja waking up in the middle of an attack on your home base.  After saving your leader, he orders you to take revenge on the man responsible, so you take on the Mark of the Ninja using special ink that gives you special abilities, but will also drive you insane.

Gameplay itself involves sneaking around heavily fortified areas, using darkness and distractions as your tools to either bypass guards undetected or take them out.  Other guards will investigate and raise alarms when they see dead bodies, so you can either hide them or use them as bait to lure the other guards into a trap.  The representation of lit areas, enemy flashlights and fields of view, and sound rings make the sneaking aspect of the game crystal clear when you're safe and when you're not, which is exactly what is required for a good sneaking game.  The game also gives you plenty of ways to get through/past guards in most cases giving plenty of replayability to try different play styles.  You also unlock different outfits that enhance certain traits, but cause disadvantages (e.g. one suit is completely silent when running and lets you equip two distraction items, but you can't equip a sword, so you can't kill anyone) so even if you're not good at a certain play style, you can try with the different costumes.  It really does make it a very different game when you go through normally vs. going through not being able to kill anyone.

Once you complete the game, you unlock New Game+, which I was questioning the purpose of the entire time since you can select any previously beaten level to play at any time.  It turns out New Game+ really ups the difficulty.  You no longer see sound rings, your field of view is more realistic (you can't see everything that's behind the way you're facing), and there are more guards.  This gives even further playback to the game if you really want a challenge.  This game is now tied with Dishonored for my favorite stealth game ever.