Ninety Nine Nights (Xbox 360) > Reviews > Falls about 80 nights short of expectations.

Author's product rating:   

Playability & Enjoyment	Limited enjoyment - rather weak playability
Addictiveness	Boring after a few games
Graphics	Excellent
Difficulty & Complexity	Very simple
Value for money	Limited value

Advantages:	The large battles are pleasurable to the eyes .
Disadvantages:	Shallow storyline and gameplay .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

Its such a shame with the 360 at the moment, having many games that promise to be great and then falling short.
I purchased ninety nine nights in the hope that it would be as I saw it dynasty warriors (of which im a long time fan) on speed.

Story:
A crystal of power was broken into two halves, a dark one and a light one. Humans have the light half and goblins the dark. Theres a demon involved somewhere (the king of ninety nine nights) but to be honest they spent so little time delving into the story you really dont care very much for any of it. It basically equates into the goblins are evil and your going to spend hours beating the living daylights out of them. The fact that they didnt further explore the story as I expected, going into depth the differences in the legends between the goblins and humans etc dissapointed me more than the lack of gameplay (dynasty warriors always offered more backstory than you could ever hope to read).

Gameplay:
Its simply a straight up button bash, thankfully the controls are well done and the camera angles are fair.
Theres the usual collect items and in-battle powerups that is featured in most of the games of this type, but it introduces nothing new.

The large numbers of enemies on screen (500+ at some points) does give a visual feast and can be quite entertaining for around 5 minutes but after that it just becomes a chore to smack your way through enemy after bland enemy.

The a.i is pretty lacking, and the bodyguards offer no apparant use, never killing an enemy and just basically gettin in the way during a boss battle as their attacks do not hurt them but seeing as though they cant be hurt mid reaction animation it makes the boss battles around 5 times longer.

The music is classical, it just fades into the background of your mind after awhile, so its a case of sticking on some hardcore rock while you smash those gobbos around.

All in all I managed to semi-enjoy the game despite all its failings but that is only down to my die-hard love of the highly similar dynasty warriors series, I have no doubt that unless you particularly enjoy those types of game you will truly despise ninety nine nights.
And if you do particulary feel the need to purchase the game id rent it before hand, the xboxlive doesnt offer enough of a snapshot, a rental will probably give you enough of the monotonous gameplay to satisfy your needs.