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Castle Assault 19.3MB
Strong Attack 20 MB
Troll Battle 11.2MB

Heating up the Hardware

Ninety-Nine Nights doesn’t look particularly amazing from any one screenshot, but this game’s true beauty lies within actually seeing it in action. Even at 1080i, the character models tend to look a little rough around the edges and some other anti-aliasing issues are noticeable. The environments shouldn’t really amaze you with their mediocre level of detail and fairly repetitive designs within each mission either. Above everything else, the best looking feature in this game involves battles sporting hundreds upon hundreds of enemy goblins, orcs, and the like. Again, no individual enemy is eye-catching, but seeing a screen full of baddies being ripped to shreds by your trusty sword is truly a sight. When the camera is placed just inches above the battlefield, it’s incredible to see how many enemies can be active on the screen while still marinating a steady frame rate. Unfortunately, activating special attacks that can help you obliterate your foes will often cause the system to bog down and the frames to get choppy, but for the most part the battle scenes are fairly impressive.

The orchestral soundtrack is one of N3’s main highlights, which helps make up for the shoddy voice acting. An epic battle simply wouldn’t be complete without powerful background music, and thankfully the sound team is responsible for delivering some masterful symphonic pieces. On the other side of the spectrum, the voice acting is comprised of melodramatic drama queens that aren’t even close to being synced with the animations. Instead of carrying on a conversation, it appears as if all the cut scenes involve random lines being spoken out of line. The voices do get annoying rather quickly and the cinematics are created in real time so they aren’t too inspiring either, which makes it unfortunate that there’s no way to just skip through them.

Ninety-Nine Fights

Surely bothersome actors and occasional frame rate hitches can detract from gameplay a little bit, but these rare nuisances shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying the experience that Ninety-Nine Nights has to offer. Features like unlockable characters, a somewhat controllable army, and RPG-like references all help N3 from being “just another button masher.”

As mentioned, any of the commander characters can receive support from two of the four army types on any given mission. Infantry and Heavy Infantry act as basic soldiers, archers can prove for long ranged attacks, and the pikemen are quite sufficient when it comes to close quarters combat. Unfortunately, the computer AI on both sides is horrid, so the support army never amounts to much. More likely than not your soldiers will be standing around with enemies right in front of them, which makes these support groups worthless. As a result, it’s easier to command your armies to stay behind while you do all of the fighting. For some reason, parts of the game won’t let you continue until every last enemy in the area is destroyed. This wouldn’t be so bad except for the problem that enemies can remain hidden within the masses of troops following you, so expect to do a lot of hunting as the enemy forces dwindle.

The seven playable heroes perform very similarly except for the sorceress Tyurru that can cast ranged water spells. Starting off at level one, each hero can grow up to level nine to increase attack power, health, and other basic attributes. You can finish any given campaign at about level six or so, and afterwards there really isn't a whole lot of incentive to go develop your heroes unless you missed out on some achievements.

During any mission, your objectives are straightforward. Generally speaking, each mission will require you to reach a specific destination while overcoming any enemy hordes you encounter along the way. Occasionaly you’ll be required to kill anything you see, but some levels simply let you run to the very end participate in an anticlimactic boss fight. The level designs aren’t all that creative either, making it easy to get bored when covering large plots of land.

Fallen enemies and sparsely populated treasure chests may contain items that can either be used instantly or equipped. Health potions, for instance, can only be used the moment you pick them up on the battlefield, so unless you just happen to find one at just the right time they probably won’t offer too much help. To make matters worse, items disappear quickly so you won’t have a chance to clean out an area and then loot the field later. Weapons, charms, and other accessories can be picked up or earned at the end of the mission. All of these items can offer increases to health, defense from ranged attacks, special attack damage, and any other appropriate aspect. Bosses will often drop items outside a reachable area if you kill them too close to certain objects, which can be real bothersome if you’re looking for something new.

As far as attacking actually goes, ‘X’ and ‘Y’ are your two major combat buttons. The ‘X’ button is generally used for quicker, less powerful attacks while ‘Y’ can easily devastate an enemy. As you gain levels, more and more combos can be unlocked that will allow you to string attacks together. Using the attack keys along in conjunction with jumping allows for a seemingly endless number of attacks, but sadly this isn’t necessary. It’s easy to wipe out entire armies by just pressing ‘X’ repeatedly, which takes away any incentive you have to learn combos. While the occasional large swarm will require some skill to overcome, as a whole the enemies don’t require any effort to kill.

Every enemy leaves a red orb once defeated, and these can be saved up to power one terrifying charged attack. Filling up the red orb meter will let you enter a rampage mode in which the character attacks faster over a much larger range, allowing the hero to defeat hundreds of enemies in a matter of seconds. Every enemy killed in the rampage mode will drop a blue orb, and filling up the blue meter allows you to unleash an attack that wipes out every non-boss enemy on the screen, which can come in handy when raiding enemy territory. Moments like these are truly exciting, and it’s shame that the rest of the game doesn’t carry the same amount of intensity

N3 in the Long Run

Once you’ve played through the entire game, which takes roughly fifteen hours depending on the gamer, there isn’t a whole lot to do. The lack of any online play or even cooperative modes is a downer, and there aren’t even online boards that would allow you to compare your scores mission by mission. Unless you’re an achievement addict destined to get an ‘A’ rank on each level, chances are you won’t find yourself replaying the campaign over and over. However, Ninety-Nine Nights is easily of the best stress relieving games of all time, so if you’re ever feeling angry it can be very rewarding to destroy thousands of goblins instead of taking it out on somebody in real life.

Conclusion

N3: Ninety-Nine Nights doesn’t offer enough innovation to distinguish itself far from the rest of the button mashers which is a real shame, but that doesn’t mean this game should be totally disregarded. The sheer number of enemies that can be fit on the screen is impressive, and if you take the time to learn new moves and build up characters you can create some pretty amazing fight sequences. Gamers looking for an action game with nonstop thrills or an RPG with deep customization options should look elsewhere, but casual players looking to relieve some stress should feel right at home. Hopefully we’ll some games in this genre that aren’t plagued with monotony, but until then Ninety-Nine Nights is a viable choice.

Gameplay       13/20
Graphics         15/20
Sound             16/20
Value              13/20
Preference      13/20
Overall          70/100