I had a chance to played the Ninja Gaiden II Demo last night for a few minutes. I was doing some work on the ‘box (don’t ask) and needed something with some serious GPU pull but without any spinning media. Well, I happened to see the new demo for Ninja Impossible x2 and thought I’d give it a go. Not only did it work for my test, the game is super sweet! Having played Gaiden on the Xbox I moved smoothly into the control system, pleasantly surprised when I didn’t die once during the whole demo (I have a feeling that was on purpose, it didn’t get the nickname Ninja Impossible for being a cakewalk).

The battle system is awesome. Fighting 10 guys is a challenge, but you feel Ryu’s power as a ninja in your hands. A lot of the elements from the first Xbox version are back, with the item store and save locations being roughly the same. The demo did it’s trick though because by the end I wanted more.. and then they cut me off wanting.

So far the game has received decent reviews. Definitely for fans of the series and not a casual gamer. I will be picking it up eventually but will probably wait for the first price drop.

Ninja Gaiden II is rated M for Mature.