I'll say this for Ninja Gaiden II -- it's got great combat.

Slicing up ninjas, demons and dinosaurs-on-fire in this new Xbox 360 game is a demanding and rewarding task. Both you and your enemies are fast and furious. Your ninjutsu is powerful, but you're constantly challenged to use it wisely. The gruesome decapitations and dismemberments, complete with body parts that lie around after you finish your opponents off, are intense.

The problem is, the game's designers seem to have focused the entirety of their energies onto perfecting the combat -- to the near-complete exclusion of all the other things that make a third-person action game entertaining.

Ninja Gaiden II is not a free-roaming adventure. It's actually a relentlessly linear one. So why does the player have to be in charge of the camera? Other games dramatically heighten the sense of adventure by giving the player expansive vistas or expressive camera angles, and Ninja Gaiden II misses out on all of this potential.

The camera isn't merely not good, it's actively bad. You have to constantly babysit it with the right thumbstick, and it seems to always be totally in the wrong place. To see enemies behind you, you have to manually swing it back around. One of the most powerful moves in the game, the Flying Swallow, sends your ninja hero flying back and forth through enemies -- great, except he always finishes the move on the wrong side of the camera.

Ninja Gaiden II's story, to the extent that it has one, is at best a throwaway good-versus-evil tale, and at worst puerile and fetishistic, with a female character who seems to exist solely for the purpose of ferrying a massive pair of half-exposed mutant breasts from scene to scene. (This is especially disappointing when you consider that the original Ninja Gaiden, starring the 50 pixels shown at right, had a significantly more interesting story.)