N3 Ninety Nine Nights

Knights come in different forms, knights of the round table, Knights that say nee and of course ninety-nine nights and by a strange coincidence we are going to talk about the latter.

In N3 (as we will call it for short) you can play as one of seven characters, each of them with their own story and of course this means that the games outcome will differ depending on which one you use, however you will need to unlock these characters as you go through the game and therefore you must begin the game with the one called Inphyy.

The game itself involves you hacking your way through hundreds of enemies to eventually accomplish your goal, it is a joy to watch as they fly through the air ten at a time as you bash the buttons manically, unfortunately with so many enemies on the screen at the one time it can become difficult to find your character, but as long as you just keep bashing the button they will soon hack their way into site.

The enemies offer little resistance individually, the only problem is that as mentioned earlier they don’t come individually as there are usually hundreds of them on the screen at any one time, they usually come in the form of Gobiln's and Orc's, however there are also some larger creatures. Fighting all these enemies does have an adverse affect on your fingers as you frantically bash the buttons trying to beat your highest kills and combo score, this all has a purpose though by giving you a ranking at the end of the mission, another good point about this is that when you kill enemies you get a red orb, if you gather enough they allow you to do a charge attack and if you kills enemies with this attack you will then get blue orb’s, again if you get enough of these you will do an even bigger attack causing mega destruction to your foes, there are also other items to collect like healing potions and power ups which come in very handy indeed.

When you hack your way through the enemies your character will gain in level and therefore learn new moves and become stronger, you will notice a meter which fills up as you gain experience, this lets you know how long it will be until you reach the next level. When your character gains levels more of your enemies will start flying through the air and it will also become easier to beat the bigger characters in the game like the orc wizards and also the rather more unsightly creatures, as you can go through the earlier missions again when your character is a higher level these obviously become easier also. The combo moves that your character learns follow the usual techniques used by games for this by making you press a sequence of buttons in the correct order which should (if you have done it right) result in you carrying out the move you started out to do.

There are over 100 weapons in the game and several forms of magic, you can find these and other items in treasure chests and when fighting. When collecting weapons you will notice that some can only be used by certain levels of character, but then I guess this gives you more motivation to gain levels. The items that you do find are easy to access by pressing the select button on the control, in this menu you will also find out the exact number of hit points that your character has left, which will give you an idea if you need to go hunting for a potion to gain your life back.

Just before the mission begins any characters that are commanders (such as Inphyy) can select two guard units as back up, these include light infantry, heavy infantry, archers and pikemen, you can control them during the game by either telling them to follow you or stay where they are, however they don’t really serve much use anyway and just tend to get in the way while you are trying to defeat the enemy.

During the game you will also see other NCP characters on the screen, these guys just tend to get on with fighting and you don't really notice their involvement until the cut scenes when a mission is complete, well unless that is you are paying attention to the dialogue that sometimes happens at the bottom of the screen instead of following the on screen action.

The fact that N3 manages to put so many characters on the screen at one time is quite an achievement, but there are some downsides to this, like when you do a special attack it is almost impossible to control the direction in which your character is going and the screen feels like it is going just too slow, this can be particularly annoying when you are fighting against the stronger characters in the game, however at least you kill lots of enemies if you do go in the correct direction.

Graphically the game is excellent, the animation is spot on and you can tell that this game is running on a next-gen machine as apart from the small problems mentioned the action is smooth running and fits in great with the operatic sounds of the soundtrack, the main characters also look great and are definitely a strong point of the game, the way their clothes flow and swords gleam is all very cinematic.

Overall N3 is a very good game, it’s just that I feel it could have been a bit better, the fighting can get quite repetitive and no matter which character you use they don’t really feel that much different, on the positive side it is so much fun fighting your way through all the enemies on the screen and you do get a great deal of satisfaction when you finally beat your highest kills rating, the game does make you want to come back for more as you will want to build all your characters up to their maximum levels and then storm all the missions again. Perhaps this is a game for fans of the hack and slash genre but it’s definitely worth renting and you never know it you might just get hooked.