On top of the core movement, you've got a wide array of abilities that let you focus on very different styles of play. The design of the game is eminently impressive at every layer. It also helps that you can pause time whenever you want, to quickly queue up multiple abilities which then play out as soon as you resume the game. The game simply wouldn't work if you weren't so incredibly nimble, and it's that basic control and mobility that makes this game as fun as it is. As a bonafide ninja, your mastery of the environment is total you can climb up walls and across ceilings, duck into ventilation ducts, dart between cover, and grapple all over the place faster than guards can possibly keep up with you. For instance, it's a lot easier to predict enemies' line of sight when they can only be facing one of two directions. The designers at Klei made things easier on themselves by smooshing Mark of the Ninja's action down to two dimensions, which naturally gives you less spatial data to process than a 3D scene and consequently helps you maintain a more confident feeling of control over everything around you. That's the highest praise I can think to give this game. You know that feeling in a stealth game when everything feels like it goes just your way, and you clear a whole room of witless guards without so much as a sound? I haven't gotten that feeling since Arkham Asylum, but Mark of the Ninja has it. Too many stealth games depend on rote memorization of enemy patterns and more or less go to shit every time you trigger an alarm, but this one, by contrast, empowers you to toy with the enemies like a stealth god, and still ably disappear unscathed back into the shadows even when the lights come up. It does exactly what a stealth game should do, giving you a wide variety of tools and abilities with which to conduct your stealthy business, and gracing you with the absolute mobility to actually use them. If you think stealth games are still stuck in a rut, you haven't played Mark of the Ninja yet.

Mark of the ninja review