Mini Ninjas Quick Impressions

Quite a change for the developers of the Hitman series, Kane & Lynch and Freedom Fighters, this action game from io interactive is a mixed bag. I love action platformers, but if there were one word to sum up the execution of Mini Ninjas it would be “tedious”. I’ve heard from some friends that their kids enjoyed the demo, but personally I was hoping for a lot more.

I played through part of the second level, and the game has the usual tropes, looking around for shit, jumping, combat, you know the drill. The art style is well done and suits the game, the combat isn’t tricky and you can actually choose spells and other items from a wheel or inventory screen without getting chopped up while making the decision. The game uses old school saves at various little outhouses through each level, and offers you the ability to reload from there or restart the level at any point. There’s even a nifty “Progress” screen that helps you know how many collectibles are in each level, though accesses it is poorly designed, which helps us collecting whores. What doesn’t help us, though, is you can never be sure what is a barrier, there is no map, and half the shit is buried in particle grass and easy to miss. Supposedly when you posses little animals with a spell they can help root the shit out, but it didn’t work for me.

One of the dumbest choices was to go the Final Faggotry route with the single character multi-character party system. This is the magical video game “reality” where you’re one dude on the screen, but really there are a bunch of dipshits with you that you can switch to whenever you want. So where are these fuckers when I’m paddling my hat canoe? In my pants? I hate this convention (as I do all Final Faggotry conventions). I guess based on the design of the game they couldn’t have a gaggle of dudes on the screen following you around, but I just hate it. I also hate no mini-map. You can press down on the d-pad and a little arrow shows up pointing you in the right direction for a second, but gimme a fucking break, where’s my mini-map? Or full map? With potions and other objects there’s a little too much inventory wrangling going on for my liking in this sort of game.

So bottom line, this is the sort of game I want to play, but Mini Ninjas isn’t the realization of that sort. There is too much blind wandering around if you want to collect, the combat can be fun but there are too many lulls, and the platforming is minimal so far. I’ll return to the game once I have a few others I’m more interested in out of the way, but I’ll be waiting for the new Ratchet & Clank to tide over the action platforming fix I need.

Tags: impressions, Video Games, xbox 360

Author: clubside

I'm so happy 'cuz I'm so stoopid... I'm not the gamer I used to be (this generation just sucks compared to the last) but I still feel the need... the need to rant!