This game contains both ninjas and evil robots. From this first sentence you’ve probably determined that it deserves at least to be looked at, no? Although, with the great tradition of games promising ninjas assaulting targets in a formula that seems bound to chemically react and produce purified awesome, it’s a little different to what you might think (See Samurai Zombie Nation for the NES). Combat is nonexistent, and the aim of the game is to hop around a square screen, avoiding attacks, picking up square golden blocks which your avatar, a small, black, oddly build squarish black figure, inexplicably stores about his person. Assuming you can do this correctly, your objective is to reach a square block that opens a square door to which you must then travel to complete the square level.

What’s odd is how well the game does this. The game has a surprising amount of depth in the controls which, whilst easy to get to grips with, have the player developing their skill at a steady rate throughout plays. The game has a consistently steady learning curve, slowly drip feeding you challenges until you’re bounding around the place using the ingenious wall-jumping system.

The game is an old fashioned 2D action-platformer, with a nice high framerate and highly satisfying death physics, with dismembered bits of your tiny ninja body bouncing around the screen seconds after you inadvertently stub your toe on a floaty red spike-mine. It eventually stops being fun to watch, yes, but you can always skip it and respawn instantly. The game gives you infinite lives, and saves at each level, meaning the only challenge is getting through the four-level episodes alive. As you progress you unlock more levels and various different colours for your ninja, the first colour unlocked being a surprisingly fruity pink hue before progressing onto marginally less extravagant colours as you continue, which I took as the game meaning I was less of a pansy for beating further levels, eventually allowing me to don my tiny man in a manly shade of orange after having simultaneously dodged enough shrapnel, missiles, and floating blue robots to man a small warship.

The games sounds range from mediocre to irritating, but there’s always the mute key. The developers saw fit to not include music in the game, which means you can play whatever you please over the top, which is a nice feature. I chose to watch my ninja prance around the screen to the dulcet tones of Benny Hill. The appearance of the game consists of about ten different colours in total, which isn’t a bad thing, it gives the game a good visual style and makes it incredibly easy to see what’s happening in other parts of the level, thanks to the bright blue enemies against black and grey backgrounds.

Now, the game comes in three different flavours, all requiring varying degrees of dedication. The first is a browser based flash version, containing about thirty episodes for a total of around 120 levels, which is a good way to find out if you like the game or not. Visit the website, and you can download the standalone version, which features around 400 levels, a fully-functioning and working level editor, and the ability to add a veritable plethora of user-made levels from the forum archive, which was a damned brilliant feature that to me lends the game infinite levels of replayability. The third option is the Xbox Live Arcade release, N+, of which I only played the demo, yet must confess that I found a bit less pleasing than the original, with a dodgey camera and a strange user interface. However, the co-op mode was vaguely fun with a friend, if I could only find out what the objective of it was.

As games go, it’s fun, original, easy to get to grips with whilst being nice and deep enough so that you can truly feel a master of, and best of all, it only uses three buttons on your keyboard to give you a huge level of abilities and control. I actually tried playing it with my Guitar Hero X-Plorer guitar. I don’t suggest you try it, but heck, it worked.

And just to insult the few of you who read that colossus of text, here’s a small, at-a-glace review.

Rating

Graphics: 8/10. Yes, it’s simple and sometimes uninteresting, but it’s a damned triumph of function and originality.
Sounds: 3/10. Somewhat annoying sounds, but they can always be turned off without crippling the experience.
Gameplay: 10/10. Assuming you download the free version, this game could last you for a very long time, and never stop being fun, which is braggable.

Overall: 9/10. A few minor flaws are nothing on this veritable diamond of a game, one that highly deserves to have you play for at least a lunchbreak.

Play It Here