When Ninety-Nine Nights takes off, it's epic: You're leading troops against wave upon wave of twisted monsters, cutting them down with a sword as big as yourself, only to find another mob over the hill. And you wind up wrestling with questions about genocide, justice, and revenge in a way that only clicks when you're delirious with bloodlust and standing in a pile of heads, and somebody asks why you enjoyed it so much.
But break the momentum, and the drama fades—and you'll realize that you're just hacking through one cookie-cutter crowd after another, banging out the same few attacks again and again. The levels have engaging twists and turns, and they flow together well. But too often, you'll have to go back and repeat them, either to build up your stats, or because you got all the way to the end of a 40-minute mission only to lose the final battle—which means you have to slog through it all over again. When a game is this cinematic, it should never make the player sit through the same reel twice.