This review was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content. It was written by Brian Mohr.

If you’re looking for another hack-and-slash title on the Xbox 360, Ninety-Nine Nights is a pretty mediocre offering at best. Players follow the story of a war between humans and goblins. You’ll battle it out with a variety of seven heroes who all have a different story to tell.

While it isn’t horrible, there isn’t much to write home about in Ninety-Nine Nights. One thing that is nice is the various players you are able to utilize. There are seven characters to play with and each one has a different story about their actions in the war. It’s neat to have this unique perspective on the game, but overall it doesn’t do enough to save what is otherwise a pretty poor experience.

One other nice touch to the lackluster experience is the soundtrack. An orchestral arrangement keeps it interesting and doesn’t get too repetitive. Sticking with the sound, the voice acting throughout is either missing or very poor.

Finally and probably the most impressive thing about Ninety-Nine Nights is the battle scenes themselves. The game does put you in the experience by showing an incredible number of enemies on-screen at one time. You’ll literally be surrounded by what seems like hundreds of enemies and it is a rather impressive sight to see as you have to slice and dice your way through them. On top of that, the animations of your characters various attacks are solid. The graphics in the game look good on the 360 especially the characters and environments, although both are ridiculously repetitive.

First and foremost, the storyline is poor at best. The story isn’t consuming, not that it has to be since the game is a straight hack-and-slash title. The problem with it though is that the gameplay is just bad. The game consists of you pushing two buttons for nearly the entire game. You simply are pounding on the X and Y buttons to hack at row upon row of enemies that come at you. Other buttons in the game do things including block, jump and dash, but none of them are that useful or necessary.

While on your way through the battle, enemies you kill will drop various orbs. This is about the only thing that gives the game any distinction because once you gain enough power you’re able to push the B button to perform a devastating attack. This is fun the first few times it happens, but quickly grows tiresome.

One other major problem in the game is the lack of interesting characters. Ninety-Nine Nights features pretty simplistic characters including a goblin, knight, mercenary and more. All of them have different fighting moves, but none of them require anymore attention since it still is just straight hack-and-slash. The one character that is different from the rest is the sorceress Tyurru, who has the ability to perform spells and water attacks.

Ninety-Nine Nights lacks any sort of replay value too. The game features few extras which include a special difficult mission, character art and biographies. None of these items are especially worthy of your time or effort, but at least they are there I suppose. It would have been nice if the developers considered versus or cooperative elements to the game.

To add insult to injury, N3 just doesn’t offer that much depth either. Each of the seven characters only have at most a half dozen battles to go through and each battle only takes approximately 15 minutes meaning you should be able to complete the game in under 20 hours; but that’s a good thing since you’ll probably never want to come back and play again.

On top of that, the actual battle experience looks good with a lot of ally and enemy forces on-screen, but their actions don’t really have any effect on the battle since they mostly are just standing around. In fact your allies more often than not just get in the way by obstructing your view and slowing down the action. Another aspect that drags the entire experience down is the lack of checkpoints. While the enemy A.I. is poor, you may find yourself losing a mission. If that happens you’ll be starting all over again losing everything you accomplished before.

The final problem that really puts Ninety-Nine Nights over the edge is the terrible artificial intelligence. The game basically features two kinds of enemies, grunts and bosses. The bosses are the only players that actually provide any sort of challenge, but once you knock them down the match is over.

While the graphics, animations and soundtrack are decent for Ninety-Nine Nights, little else makes the game worthy of its $50 suggested retail price. The gameplay is horribly repetitive relying on two buttons the entire game. Add to that the dull story, terrible enemy A.I. and the lack of a multiplayer component and N3 grows tiresome within minutes. Sadly the game had promise, but in the end isn’t worth your time or money.

The gameplay is miserable with simple repetitive button pushing.

Graphics of environments and enemies look good, but repetitive.

The music is pretty solid, but the voice acting is difficult to listen to.

N3 isn’t an enjoyable experience in just about every way.

It’s too repetitive to ever come back to; no multiplayer and the poor extras.