Finished Mark of the Ninja in a no-alert, no-kill run all the way. Was really fucking frustating at a couple parts (especially the final stage), but pretty satisfying to be able to accomplish it and think up creative ways to lure out guards and get around them. Started a second run and was pleasantly surprised that the game rewards KILLING as much as stealth, if not more so! Originally when I did stage 1 and killed all the dudes, I got a shitty score and figured to get a good score you needed to stealth it and get the no alerts/no kills score bonuses. And while those do get you good scores and 3 seals on each stage, if you're high score running it, you can get even higher scores doing no alerts, all kills runs...and boy is it fun.
Suddenly I'm using all my tools and moves and the game is still challenging me to think up creative solutions to each puzzle room in order to murder all the guards in as high scoring and creative ways as possible without being detected. I'm having to think up entirely different solutions than when I was doing a no-kill run, but the game is just as challenging this way and just as rewarding because sneaking around doing all sorts of stealth kills is fricken fun. The no-kill bonus is usually only about 8,000 points, whereas there's often 20-30 enemies in a stage and if you kill them with style, distract them, freak guards out and hide the bodies you can get 600-1000 point per guy (well you can get 200 or so distraction/undetected points out of them on a no-kill run too; so really it's a 400-600 point per guard difference). But yeah, even at 400 points x 20 guards, that's equal to the 8,000 no-kill bonus. So if you do anything interesting with the kills you'll end up with higher score runs for killing than not-killing. Pretty cool and interesting. You probably don't even need the no-alert bonus (usually about 3,000 points) so if you wanted to do a rambo style run in and kill everyone, you could probably still rack up really high scores even with alerts.
It's also fun just taking my time and exploring all the levels, getting all the sub-objectives, getting all the scrolls. Basically 100%-ing the game while I murder everyone in the level. Satisfying!
Overall I really liked the game. The animation is fluid, the core mechanics are fantastic stealth sandboxing, the level design is truly great with many paths and solutions to every section, the game generally has good checkpointing and along with a checkpoint restart system that doesn't dock you for using it and thus encouraging experimentation, and the length is pretty ok with a lot of replayability.
Where it falls down is that the story is boring, I wanted to skip every cutscene and never cared about anything going on. Occasionally you have to fight the controls, the final "level" is terrible, and the worst part about the game is that it's occasionally glitchy; sometimes in a good way that helps you (like setting off alarms and dying and then you restart just ahead of where you died in the next section without the alarm counting; sometimes in a REALLY BAD WAY where you're doing a no-kill run and some guy off screen in a completely different section will keep doing something that kills him giving you an unwanted kill and you can't do anything about it [had this happen at the end of the final stage and it really annoyed me >_<]); but 80% of the time the game runs perfect and is quite fun. Would play a sequel for sure.
3.5/4
