Ninja Assassin is a great looking game with a penchant for particularly stylish dismemberment, and it’s based on the action movie of the same name. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the good stuff ends.
I’m calling this a Quick Look because, despite my best efforts and over an hour of trying, I can’t get past the fourth stage of the game. Keep in mind that I don’t mean I played the game for only an hour — I mean I’ve been on that one level for over an hour.
I’ve been a gamer all of my life, and although I’m probably best at first-person shooters, I’ve dabbled enough in the hack-and-slash and stealth genres to believe that I should be faring much better in Ninja Assassin than I am. Unfortunately, playing as Raijo the ninja has been more of a lesson in humility and getting my ass kicked than any sort of good time. If I ever wanted to play a game where I would know only constant defeat and feel like utter crap…well, let’s just say I now know “there’s an app for that”
My main problems with Ninja Assassin are the difficulty level (which ramps up too quickly) and the controls (which get me killed more often than they help me kill). I’ll break this piece down into the two main parts of my experience with Ninja Assassin:
Stages 1-3: The game isn’t great, but it’s all right
The game starts off pretty slowly, going so far as to pause the action after you accomplish basic things like hiding at the top of the screen and drawing a line to move or slash an enemy. The first two levels have you believing you’re a deadly ninja badass who can strike from the shadows with your katana (which is a samurai’s weapon) and assassinate people with your shuriken. You have the choice to turn the game into an all out slash-fest by just drawing lines all over your enemies and watching the blood fly, but there are always skylights or electrical pole wires to use for cover if you’d like to play all ninja-like…at least, until the third level comes.
There are no stealth elements on the third level: just mindless and frantic swiping at the boss’s sprite (and his armed bodyguards) in a race to kill him before he kills you. You can’t really dodge his attacks because the game’s controls aren’t really tight enough – everything feels just a little too sluggish despite the fact that you’re supposed to be a ninja. It took me a few tries, but I eventually downed Mr.Chainsaw and was treated to a fancy red backdrop as he painted the walls with himself. Like the header of this article section says: at this point the game was still all right. It felt a little clumsy, but it wasn’t impossible.
Stage 4: Save money on your haircuts, just play this level
This stage marks the start of Act II (out of four acts), and most gamers will likely reach it within 15 minutes of their first play-through. In other words, you’re still pretty new to the game, but this stage feels like the redonkulously difficult ending to a 12-hour game where you’ve slowly honed your skills up to a masterful level.
The game teaches you about a new move which takes advantage of your chain-blade to ambush enemies while staying hidden in the treetops. Using the chain blade from the trees looks a lot like a toad snagging flies with his tongue — except the enemies are dragged into the trees and turn into mists of blood when they get there.
The level starts off with you ambushing two enemies at a time, and you’ve got to make sure that one bad guy’s back is turned before snagging the other. However, within minutes that number is ramped up to seven — and all of a sudden the difficulty level is merciless, since one small slip-up can get you killed, and the game never actually tells you you’ve been spotted until ninjas complete their patrol and suddenly whack you out of hiding with a shuriken.
This would still be manageable if the controls and camera were all right, but they’re not. Hiding in the shadows require you to tap on-screen, which happens to be the same mechanic you use to throw shuriken when on the ground. The game urges you to take cover on the ground (hiding in the shadow of a tree) and in the air (hiding in the branches), but the game very often confuses a tap on the tree to mean “throw a shuriken and expose Thomas while he’s really just trying to hide”.
I then thought that hiding in the branches would be safer overall, and so I tried to combine that with the ninja fishing move (snagging enemies with the chain blade) to slowly whittle the enemy numbers down in the hopes of finishing the level. My plans were squashed here, too, by more strange tapping behaviour. For one thing, you can’t actually see yourself in the tree-line because your character model is drawn behind the trees, and you can only snag enemies when they’re near or below you. When you hide on the ground the game shows you an illuminated outline of yourself for reference, but there is no such outline when you hide in the branches. Apparently, your character is so bloody good at hiding himself that sometimes he doesn’t even know where he is — and he doesn’t want you to know either.
You can solve this issue a little by moving to spots on the branches that aren’t obscured by the vegetation, but this can lead to another problem: the camera suddenly panning over to the next screen.
Like many other 2D hack-and-slash games, Ninja Assassin’s camera only pans one screen at a time. Once you get to the right or left extreme of the screen, the whole view shifts over so you can see more of the right or left. This works if your character has enough health to duke it out with enemies that suddenly appear on the screen, but it’s a horrible choice for a game that relies on stealth and observing enemy movements.
What all of this boils down to is a level that I just cannot beat. I’ve put the game down so many times over the last two days, only to come back to it after a break of a few hours to try it again. “Maybe it’s just me”, I think, “maybe I’m just getting too angry.” Thankfully, time and time again the game will respond with its insane difficulty level, clumsy controls, and a perspective that’s meant for another genre (or at least a beefier character) — all of which thoroughly kick my ass and have me retreating to the Home Button of Sanity.
I find it very strange that the first two levels focus on basic stealth, the third opts for an all-out bloodbath against a chainsaw-wielding maniac, and the fourth requires extreme, calculated precision — all within the first 20 minutes of gameplay.
Conclusion
So there you have it, folks. I can’t review this game — not only because it makes me furious to try and play it, but because it’s so naturally (seven ninjas) and artificially (via the ridiculous controls) difficult that I actually cannot beat the fourth stage to experience more. I don’t know if Ninja Assassin is attempting to be a stealth game, a hack and slash game, or a mix of both, but I can say with supreme confidence (and hands full of my own hair) that I don’t think it’s very much fun.
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Ninja Assassin is available for $4.99 on the App Store.
Warner Bros. provided a promo code to Just Another iPhone Blog for the review of Ninja Assassin. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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TAGS: action, ninja
