In its own right, Tenchu is actually quite a popular gaming series that has seen its day in the sun - 'has' being the key word. As time went on, it seemed this once awesomely unique Ninja action series lost its edge, as it got thrown around various publishers and developers each failing to live up to the promising potential showcased in the original. These days, Japanese based developer K2 and publishers From Software handle all that is Tenchu, and while it is nice to see an updated version on the 360 in Tenchu Z, unfortunately this is not the turn around game the series so desperately needed.

Over the years, the formula for this ninja based action series has barely changed at all and this remains true in Tenchu Z. This means in Z, like the others, you carry about your objectives with stealth as your primary focus, moving around dark areas to stay concealed, crouching and stepping lightly to limit your noise, and eliminating enemies from behind without drawing attention. This is the idea anyway - there's usually nothing forcing you to play with stealth, it is just how the game is 'meant' to be played. Basically, if you have ever played a Tenchu game before, Z won't likely offer any surprises with its gameplay.

And this - the gameplay - is where the disappointments start to set in . Tenchu Z is really a very unimaginative carbon copy of the earlier titles, replicating more or less exactly what the series played like almost ten years ago when it was originally released on the PSX. If it wasn't for the updated graphics, which are barely above average for an Xbox 360 game these days anyway, you may as well be playing any of the previous titles, as the game does little to take advantage of the 360's power when it comes to the gameplay.

It's not that the game is unplayable, it just fails to take this series to the next level, and offers much less than what it could have. The single player story, for instance, is really more of a thrown together series of random missions without any real attempt at an immersive storyline behind it - you are told little about where you come from, what you're doing, and why you're doing it. After a brief training mission used to introduce the game's mechanics, you are planted in an ultra restrictive (ugh, invisible walls galore!) and somewhat pointless interactive area with huts representing your options, of which a measly two exist - one for modifying your character, the other for choosing the next mission - going back and forth between them finishing missions and buying new abilities and items, with instances of text based screens thrown inbetween mission loads to briefly cover the actual storyline. As you can see, the single player experience is very disjointed and heartless with no real direction.

The game does try to add some dimension to the single player mode by implementing the ability to define your character visually and abilities wise when you start the game and throughout the single player mode, but these just don't seem to come through in the gameplay. Having the ability to purchase and manage combos and special attacks is great, but for a game based on stealth and not full on combat, it seems rather redundant as all your character really needs to be able to do is one swift attack from behind to kill his enemies, and given from the very start of the game your character is 100% effective at doing this, the inclusion of abilities and upgrades just doesn't correspond with the primary focus of the gameplay at all. If anything, the abilities focus should have been on more creative ways to kill your enemies from behind, as the few animations the game tends to feature can become repetitive very quickly, with their annoyingly exaggerated blood effects that just aren't very cool to see the 150th time in an hour.

However, perhaps the worst part about Tenchu Z and an area which has always been an issue for this series is the enemy AI. Back when Tenchu was considered a quality game, AI in gaming was not an area of huge expectations and you could get away with obvious flaws, but these days you really can't expect to get away with enemies so dumb that, if you attack them in full view and then run into some bushes a few yards away, they will forget all about you and go back to their routine patrol like nothing happened; like you didn't just stick your ninja sword in their chest. Not only is this alive and well in Z as well as many other instances of poor AI, but even when the AI of enemies is not making you shake your head, the game still doesn't do itself any favors by featuring movement routines and patterns that are repeated endlessly by your enemies, with very little in the way of randomness and variations to keep you on your toes, making the game predictable and quite boring at times.

This is not to say the game is easy by any means - in fact it can be quite challenging - but what Tenchu Z really challenges is your patience, as in if you actually have the patience to sit and watch enemies for minutes on end while taking note of sections to their movement routines which are prone to a safe stealth attack, then you will probably never fail. In many ways, Z is actually closer to a puzzle game than an action combat game, as its very design lends itself far better to those with strengths in problem solving and pattern diagnosis than joystick jockey-ing and button mashing. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it's just the way Z executes it that leaves a lot to be desired thanks to the lack of variation and detail, ultimately leading to a lot of repetitive and tedious gameplay. When an action game is so dull it could probably have been produced just as well in a turn based adventure game engine, you know you've got a problem.

In fairness though, it's not all bad. When you are playing the game properly and don't come across examples of the severely lackluster enemy AI, the game can be reasonably enjoyable and rewarding, particularly if you've never played a Tenchu game before and may be new to this type of stealth driven gameplay. Even though the game is primarily sword based, you can deploy other weapons such as explosives and arrows which do help to add some variation to the gameplay, not to mention a grappling hook to quickly shoot around the level, which is particularly useful for getting high on roof tops, where you are basically safe to move about without detection. While the few positives never manage to even come close to putting aside the game's flaws, if you look hard enough, there is some decent gameplay to be had, just don't expect it to come with lengthy sessions where you'd be giving the game too much opportunity to fall over itself and get to you repetition wise.

Thankfully, Tenchu Z does offer more than its single player mode with the ability to go online via Live, although once again the game fails to go deep enough by only offering the ability to play co-op on the same single player missions you've already experienced. While there are more than 50 single player missions, they rarely vary in setting and environment further adding to the game's persistent repetition, and even though mission objectives do change here and there, the core gameplay itself never changes, which as I think I already pointed out isn't very good (just in case I didn't, Z's gameplay isn't very good). It's really no surprise the game can't offer anything more than co-op for multiplayer, because the game simply isn't setup to test real human intelligence when it comes to stealth gameplay. Rather than expand the game's fundamentals, K2 just made the CPU AI retarded so it can be fooled by really basic things that humans in a ninja vs ninja setting wouldn't even come close to being fooled by, so while the inclusion of Live multiplayer can't hurt, it can and does expose the game and its obvious shortcomings by simply looking at what it doesn't offer.

Tenchu Z may be on the 360, but nothing has really been done at all to fully embrace what is easily the most powerful platform this series has been released on, and this is quite disappointing as I believe this type of gameplay can work much better than it has. What we end up with here is a very ordinary, already dated feeling thrown together game with no real depth to speak of in any aspect, that only offers enough value for a rental and not a purchase, and even then probably only if you have never played a Tenchu game or at least not in a long while. Will the Tenchu series ever be able to recapture its original charm without falling behind the standards of cutting edge gaming? Who knows. All I know is, Microsoft can't possibly be this desperate for Japanese developing support.