Along with the usual dreams of playing for England or being an astronaut, it’s a safe bet that most of us at one stage during our childhood had aspirations of becoming a ninja. For a certain generation this is thanks in part to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the fact that Japan’s silent assassins are ultra-cool and hard-as-nails explains their continuing popularity. We on the Play team have happy memories of sneaking about the house dressed from head-to-toe in black, with a plastic sword strapped to our back and some homemade throwing stars (card covered in tinfoil of course), on a mission for a Japanese feudal lord to assassinate the cat.

It’s little surprise then that there are countless ninja-themed games, all trying to captivate that small child in us all. The Tenchu series has been around since the days of the PSOne, and in that time has built up an eager following, despite the fact that most of the Tenchu games aren’t actually any good. The first one had its unique charm, but with each subsequent instalment this was overshadowed by the series’ dodgy gameplay and ropey graphics. That being the case, we approached Tenchu: Time Of The Assassins with some trepidation, but imagine our surprise when it turned out to be even worse than we expected.

The most obvious problem with Time Of The Assassins is the absolutely horrendous draw distance. You literally can’t see further than about two feet in front of your character’s face, which in a game where you have to use stealth and sneak up on your enemies, is absolutely unacceptable. We lost count of the times we were spotted by a guard that we didn’t even know was there, which became just as annoying as you’d imagine. It may be argued that the limitations of the PSP hardware are to blame for this, but with games like Syphon Filter and the forthcoming Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, it’s obvious that the PSP is capable of so much more.

Once a guard has clocked you, the game’s next biggest problem rears its ugly head: the combat. If you’re lucky enough to sneak up on someone, performing stealth kills is simple enough, but when you have to fight an enemy face-to-face, things start to get a lot less straightforward. You can hold down L to lock-on to your opponents, but the function doesn’t work very well, so you frequently become disorientated, and with no manual camera control you’ll spend most of the time just hammering the attack button and hoping. The combat’s a bit of a joke really, and even with the few extra moves available to your ninja assassin, you’ll never actually enjoy any of the battles. Of course, the best way to avoid them is to be stealthy, but the draw distance makes that almost impossible, so you get caught in a particularly vicious cycle.

The combat isn’t helped by the control scheme, but once again, this is the fault of the game, rather than the PSP. Syphon Filter has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the handheld can do justice to a third-person game, but with Time Of The Assassins, it feels like the developer has just taken the PS2 control scheme and wedged it onto the PSP without realising that there’s one less analogue stick and two less shoulder buttons. As if navigating the game wasn’t troublesome enough, the control scheme compounds the problem even further and makes completing the missions a chore.

Not that the missions don’t make a concerted effort to be as dull as possible. Most of them consist of navigating a boring level – preferably by sneaking past the guards – and locating a certain character, either to assassinate them or get some information from them. There are a few missions where you have to escort an NPC through the level, and these are as infuriating as you’d imagine, thanks to the awful AI. To be honest, not a lot has changed since the early Tenchu games, but what may have been acceptable in 1998 just doesn’t cut the mustard today.

Tenchu: Time Of The Assassins was released in Japan last July, and when playing the game it became painfully obvious why it has spent the last 12 months in limbo waiting for a publisher. The series’ heritage isn’t that great, but this is easily the worst Tenchu game yet, and one of the least successful attempts to bring a PS2 franchise to the PSP that we’ve seen. The thick darkness that surrounds the levels breaks the game before you even start thinking about any of the other issues, and you end up with something that makes the experience of being a ninja seem dull and pointless.

And that is the biggest nail in Time Of The Assassins’ coffin. Guess it’s back to trying to assassinate the cat then: wonder if that ninja suit still fits us?

Jude Salmon