Tenchu: Time of the Assassins

It's a playground debate that may never be settled. On the one hand, pirates wear eye-patches, clutch daggers between their teeth, make irritating floppy-fringed heroes walk planks of wood into the gleaming jaws of sharks and get to drink grog all day. On the other, ninjas make it okay to wear headbands again, get to throw shuriken at enemies' foreheads and can live in your house undetected for years.

Will it ever be clear which is better? The former is a communal profession: pirates stick together, pillaging and plundering in one boisterous, salty family. The latter is for the solitary worker; the ideal profession for a loner prepared to instantly kill himself in a spray of hara-kiri should he accidentally make the slightest honour-defaming noise.

That both ninjas and pirates are aspirational playground heroes is obvious but in reality you probably wouldn't make friends with either: take one home for a quick game of Pro Evolution and the moment your back's turned, they're either stealthily gutting or noisily seeing to your mum. Being a game all about ninjas, darkness and grudges that can only be settled by shadows and blood stains, Tenchu: Time of the Assassins mercifully focuses your attention on the former: stealth and cuts.

An adaptation of the similarly titled PlayStation games, the Tenchu series is partly responsible for inventing the sneak 'em up genre of videogames and this PSP iteration sees you hopping from doorway to roof-top, silently carrying out the deadly orders of your lords and masters. Manage to sidle up to a guard undetected and you can execute a suitably nasty kill move (earning the game its 16+ only rating). If you are detected, the game shifts into a John Woo-esque blur of balletic jumps to the head, knee kicks to the groin and knife cuts to the cheek. Alternately, you can run off and hide behind the nearest feudal postbox until the alarm settles and all the guards go back to their lazy patrolling.

The missions, which are divided up into neat vignettes (across five different campaigns), are perfect for portable play and you're entirely free to approach each stage as you want to, essentially giving you choice between a more stealth or action oriented approach.

While the 3D environments are pretty – suitably moon-soaked and cherry-blossomed – and the characters look as though they're on happy vacation from a PS2 game, the visible distance in the game, whether by developer choice or necessity, is disappointingly short. It becomes difficult to even see across the room in some situations, which, while adding a certain tension to your mission, results in you never quite being sure when an enemy is going to pop into view. Not to mention the fact that your character's short-sightedness hardly fits with the masked assassin themes of the game.

All of the above is further hurt by a horrible automatically controlled camera, which bumps into walls and falls over itself to make things harder for you than they already are. And while the R-trigger centres the camera behind your ninja, this barely helps in many situations.

Countering these negative aspects is content. For instance, on top of the five campaigns and 30-odd unlockable characters there's a map editor – a beloved function lifted from the series' second PlayStation game. There's a pleasing amount of variety for the imaginative town-planner and with practise some extremely complex layouts can be achieved to make maintaining ninja silence as tough as possible for your player. Or your friends – in a move that vastly increases the game's longevity, these levels can be shared via the memory stick.

Alongside this map sharing, Tenchu also features both competitive and, brilliantly, co-operative wireless play. These co-op levels are a little on the short and limited size but it's a hugely welcome addition and one that other PSP titles will hopefully replicate.

So, draw distance and camera issues aside, stealth gaming is still as heart stopping as ever. More importantly, perhaps, it appears to settle an age-old debate: witnessing your character unravel, ribbon-like, while falling from a rooftop onto an adversary's smooth neck to end their life with a sharp twist of the hips, it's obvious ninjas are totally cooler than pirates.