Aragami: Nightfall (PlayStation 4) Review

The prequel story is a bit light on delivering new information or context to the main game, and it rather seems to serve as a reason to jump right back into the gameplay and assassinate enemies, while keeping under cover of darkness. Hyo and Shinobu, while providing new insights into assassins from the Nisshoku point-of-view, remain as different skins of the titular character. While playing as both delivers slightly different cut-scenes in some cases, it still tells the same story for the most part. Unfortunately, the story does suffer from an issue that plagues many prequel stories; the end-point is known, making any sense of urgency in this story quite pointless.

However, there are three new abilities in addition to the already-existing Kage ability, which causes temporary invisibility. Shadow Grenade is used as a diversion, engulfing a group of enemies into a puff of smoke, rendering them temporarily "stunned." Explosive Kunai throws an explosive shuriken, while Twin Shadow allows for the AI or online partner to perform a sneaky kill when initiated. The Kage is the fourth ability, which is equally as effective as the others, although it does suffer from environmental limitations, such as when opening doors, the ability deactivates. Making this worse is that enemies can still kill Hyo or Shinobu during the door opening animations.

Gameplay-wise, Nightfall delivers more of the same that the base game presented, with four stages to sneak around. The animations are so fluid that the controls feel great always. The janky camera can still sometimes get in the way of a good sneak, as it tends to get stuck in walls and in confined rooms but, for the most part, it works properly and acts as it is supposed to. Stages have collectibles to try to lengthen each stage, but there is no real incentive to getting these except for bragging rights on the trophy and achievements lists.

There is an online portion that, in theory, should allow for mission partnerships. However, as of writing the review, there was little action taking place online, and, therefore, this portion of the game was not able to get reviewed.