After hearing that Acquire had once again picked up the reigns as the developers on the latest in the Tenchu series, Shadow Assassins, the hope was that it would have been a great experience for someone who enjoyed the original game as much as I had. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The Wii iteration in the franchise houses quite a few irritating control and gameplay mechanics that keep this from happening.
As in the first games, you play as both Rikimaru and Ayame, the Emperor Goda’s assassins, this time eventually tasked to save the his daughter from a mysterious kidnapper. The story is a forgettable one, cluttered with bad voice acting and marginally decent cut scenes. But more than likely, players are going to pick this up for the potential fun of killing enemies as a ninja with a Wii remote in a stealth action environment.
Shadow Assassins, however, seems to have broken away from the traditional stealth action gameplay that was in the original games, instead almost presenting itself as a stealth puzzle game with annoyances seemingly being a huge motivation for remaining undiscovered. Previously in the series, players had the ability to somewhat easily run away and hide or fight your way out of the situation when seen by an enemy. This was thrown out the window this time around, instead having the player sit through a repetitive cut scene where Rikimaru disappears into a cloud of what appears to be black feathers, reappearing at the beginning of the stage. If there happens to be a ninjato in your inventory at the time of discovery, however, you are forced to engage the enemy in one of the most irritating mini-games I’ve ever had to participate in. After a shorter version of the disappearing act cut scene, your viewpoint switches to first-person. In this mode, you are expected to make split-second movements with a sometimes unreliable Wii remote in order to block the opponents attacks, one failure resulting in yet another teleport to the beginning of the stage. Not only must the Wii remote be turned to the right angle as quick as possible, but if you are off just a bit, the ninjato takes damage and could very well end up breaking. Once it breaks, you can probably figure out where you will end up next, only this time swordless.
As you can see, there is an ongoing theme here when it comes to failure in this Tenchu: it’s okay, try again. While the Japanese version of the game was quite punishing (getting discovered meant a Game Over screen), Ubisoft made some difficulty tweaks to the North American version, more than likely to help along the more casual player base of the Nintendo console. With as many times as I was discovered by guards, a Game Over screen was not seen until halfway through the game during a ridiculous boss battle that must be won in the sword fighting mini-game. The best way Ubisoft could have made things easier on players and keep them wanting to even continue playing the game: tighten up the controls a bit. 
Not only were they frustrating during the first-person sword parts, randomly during surprise attacks that required a thrust forward of the Wii remote the action was left undetected, making the enemy dodge your attack if the motions were finally detected, putting you at the start of the level.
Acquire didn’t do a completely terrible job with the game. One cool feature they added was the Mind’s Eye, allowing you look around the character and actually see the enemy’s cone of vision along with pointing out light sources and places to hide. The assassination sequences were done fairly well and the music was enjoyable. These few things, however, were not enough for me to even recommend renting this game for those who are not huge fans of the series. Personally, if I was not playing this game for review, it would have been sent back to GameFly before the tutorial was complete.
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