NIOH 2

A messy return to Team Ninja’s beguiling Sengoku Soulslike

There’s a rather pointed warning from our demo handler as we sit down. If it’s been a while since we last played Nioh, we might want to spend some time in the tutorial: while we’ll be dropped straight into the game, after our first death we’ll be given the choice of loading into it instead of respawning. We smile and nod, intending to do nothing of the sort. It takes all of 30 seconds for the hubris to evaporate. As we chuckle ruefully from our watery grave – we were too distracted by the guard with the rifle to notice the bridge under our feet was riddled with holes – we figure that, yes, it might be worth revisiting the basics. It has been a while, after all.

It doesn’t help that our demo is set around halfway into Nioh 2, though at least we’ve got a suite of appropriately powerful gear. It’s also rather awkward to feel our FromSoft muscle memory take over, stabbing the block button Sekiro-style at the moment of impact as if it’s going to make any difference, tapping Dark Souls’ R1 to try to attack in a game that uses the face buttons instead. We’ve got excuses for days, honestly, but we don’t really need them. Nioh was punishingly difficult. Nioh 2 is, on this evidence, no different.