In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.
We try pretty hard to avoid lazily dropping cliches into our writing here at PC Gamer, which puts me in an awkward position as I sit down to pitch to you why a remaster, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, is one of the best games of 2025, despite mostly being a fresh Unreal Engine 5 skin for a game that came out in 2008. So if I must sin, I may as well see just how many forbidden phrases from the style guide I can use at once.
2025's brand new Ninja Gaiden 4, despite being a visceral action romp with more bloody decapitations than you can shake a stick at, is ultimately a bit of a mixed bag. At its core is a pulse-pounding combat system that echoes the greats of yesteryear, but it's rough around the edges. Fans of the genre will still find a lot to like, but at the end of the day it's not without flaws. If you turn off your brain you'll get a kick out of PlatinumGames' no-holds-barred attempt to make Ninja Gaiden combat on crack, but it never lives up to the heights of the esteemed franchise.
In other words: They really don't make 'em like they used to.
Sorry. Sorry!! That must've been pretty gross to read. If you threw up, that's on me. I thought about jamming a "It's the Dark Souls of…" line in there somehow, but was worried the paragraph may actually become so cursed it could be summoned to life as if through some necromantic power.
I just needed you to know that I know how ridiculous it is to bust out "they don't make 'em like they used to" against Ninja Gaiden 4, a game in a genre that's starved for new additions and by its very nature feels like it belongs more to the 2000s than the 2020s. And the 2D platformer Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound and Sega's beautiful Shinobi metroidvania-lite are both kinda catching strays here, because they're good, and we couldn't have had the year of the ninja without them.
It's just that when it comes to slicing a thousand dudes into bloody ribbons while riding a wave of pure adrenaline, nothing does it like Ninja Gaiden 2 Black.
To me, the 2008 NG2 is simply the best character action game ever made, trading away the 2004 Ninja Gaiden's more measured defense and level exploration for linear stages of precise hyperviolence. Cutting off a limb allows you to instantly execute an enemy as blood gushes from the wound; absorbing their blood essence after you've dismembered them can either serve as vital restorative health or instead fuel an automatic combo that guarantees a kill and a few seconds of invulnerability.
Ninja Gaiden 2 is mercifully free of gimmicky setpieces and drip-feed unlocks that you'll find in Ninja Gaiden 4; where that game gives you four weapons, Ninja Gaiden 2 gives you 11, and almost each one makes you think "this is the sickest thing I've ever used" until you find the next one 45 minutes later and guess what?
Yeah, it's sicker.
Even better, Ninja Gaiden 2 starts you with all your essential combat abilities available from the first second of the first level. Learn to use them or die: the game doesn't care which.
The original version of the game is also full of bullshit: ranged enemies that will knock you off ropes as you slowly climb them, a couple terrible bosses, slowdown galore. It feels like they rushed it out the door six months early, and yet it still goes incredibly hard, the combat making up for all the bad bits if you tune into the game's frequency the way I did in 2008, and still do in 2025. I deeply admire the dev team's commitment to throwing hordes of enemies at you even when it tanked the framerate, because they knew the lethality of the combat system they'd designed fully came alive when it pushed you to the ragged limits and dared you to become unstoppable.
A later port, NG2 Sigma, cleaned up a lot of the mess, which was probably the right call—but in the process it cut back on those enemy numbers and made some tweaks to the blood and balance that diluted the game's essence. It was a less frustrating, more even-tempered game, but also a less special one. And that was the only version you could easily play for, basically, the last 15 years. Until now. Until Black.
This version of the game is an earnest attempt to marry Sigma's cleaned up port with the more jagged original, and while it doesn't fully return to the original's overwhelming enemy numbers and aggressive balancing it gets a hell of a lot closer. A still-in-development mod gets closer still. In time I feel confident that this will be without compromise the definitive version of the definitive ninja game.
I tried (unsuccessfully
