WORK: PixelHunt – Ninja Blade Review

At first, I thought a ninja cat would be a cute idea. But the more I look at this picture, the more uncomfortable I get. Hold me.

Hey crazy cats (or should I say ninja cats? LORF I JUST DID A LAME LOL, LOLOLOL), issue 10 of PixelHunt is out and I’ve got a review in there. It’s free to download and view at your leisure, so do check it out when you get a moment and some bandwidth. Below is the full, unedited review.

Ninja Blade
Distributor: Microsoft
Developer: From Software
Rated: MA15+
Genre: Action/Adventure
Review System: Xbox 360
Available also on:  n/a

I’m going to start with a seemingly irrelevant analogy, but bear with me.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, award winning music producer David Bendeth, who has worked with the likes of Paramore and Hawthorne Heights, said that music was getting louder, and mostly for the worse. He explained that sound engineers were making songs louder to catch our attention by applying dynamic range compression to reduce the difference between the loudest and softest note in a song. This, he argued, was robbing music of its emotional power, obscuring sonic detail, and removing any real sense of dynamic.

While Bendeth was talking about music, his words couldn’t be more applicable to Ninja Blade. An unabashedly over-the-top action-adventure, Ninja Blade has had its outrageous meter cranked up to 11 – and that’s where it stays the whole time.  Players step into the silent shoes of a ninja named Ken, whose role is to slice and dice the inhabitants of Tokyo who have been infected by the mutant-inducing Alpha Worm, and the gory action never ends. There isn’t a moment to breathe and actually realise where you are or what you’re dealing with – you’ve just found yourself in a world of grotesque mutants and your character acts like it’s normal. Well, it isn’t. The game even shows us it isn’t in the opening cut-scenes. WHO IS THIS NINJA TRYING TO FOOL?

The thing is, games that aren’t afraid of exaggeration and intensity are often really fun to play, but this one missed the mark. Going into Ninja Blade, I’d already been warned by my peers of how insanely over-the-top it was; I’d already seen the footage of mutant monstrosities getting their innards ripped out of them, the impossible acrobatic moves that the ninjas could perform, and the polka-dot/leopard skin ensemble that players could make Ken wear. I went in knowing not to take the game too seriously and just have fun with its silliness. But despite being prepared to enjoy the game and having its flaws justified to me (“Yeah, it’s all crazy and epic, but it was intentional and you should just let go and have fun!”), the game still left me cold. I ended up with a greater desire to do my taxes than continue the mutant-slashing ninja adventure.

Okay, that’s a lie. I don’t even know how to do my taxes – I just paid someone a chocolate bar to make it go away – but that’s beside the point. As I played through the game, absorbing the ever-so-original, paper-thin story about infected citizens and the imminent destruction of Tokyo, I couldn’t help but feel that the game had begun to plateau, even in its earliest stages.

From the opening moments when Ken, dived off a plane – sans parachute – sliced through raw winged mutants, and crashed through the window of a skyscraper, breaking his fall with a forward roll, to the insanely massive spider-like mutant boss that appeared minutes later – it was sensory overload.

It’s not so much that I’m some kind of fragile flower petal who can’t handle battling ridiculously large and pustulent bosses at every corner, either. The problem is the obscuring of sonic detail that Bendeth was talking about earlier – the lack of dynamic and build-up that creates a situation where there is no light to appreciate the dark, no soft to appreciate the hard, and no stark contrasts in the scale of enemies for us to appreciate the monstrous bosses that look like they’ve burst forth, fully-formed from the arse of Satan. There’s not down-time for us to get excited, scared, or feel suspense, and certainly no breathing space for is to comprehend what the hell is going on.

Of course, there is the argument that Ninja Blade was intended to be consistently over-the-top and proudly exaggerated in every aspect of its art and design, but the fault here is that when everything is big and grotesque with few shades in between, it all begins to get a bit vanilla. So what if this boss has tentacles that have tentacles of their own? I just fought three. And so what if I get to ride a rocket? I just leapt out of a plane and broke my fall on concrete by doing a roley-poley. It’s too easy to become blasé about it, and when a game featuring so many genetic mutations solicits such a response, then perhaps it’s doing something wrong.

Speaking of doing things wrong, the game’s use of Quick Time Events (QTEs) is nothing short of ridiculous. While a common complaint of games that employ QTEs, Ninja Blade‘s use of them should be classified as abuse. The game is so reliant on QTEs that half the time is spent hitting buttons that correlate to what appears on the screen rather than making any real use of the weapons and skills that Ken has. Which is a shame because there is so much potential there. Players have access to a selection of long and short-ranged weapons, broad swords for striking and even wind attacks (not of the flatulent variety). It could have been a more interactive experience if the game made more use of the player’s skills, rather than falling back on a QTE for everything – dodgying, leaping, catching, and finishing moves. I was surprised there wasn’t one for walking and breathing.

As it stands, Ninja Blade is just a dull, passive experience. There are other games that do crazy and epic better than it can, and there are a helluva lot more games that have enough tonal differences to make them interesting. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see how those taxes of mine are going.

Interesting Fact: The costume editor allows you to dress your ninja in hot pink fashions.

Favourite Moment: I had failed a Quick Time Event, so the game made me do it again, and again, and again. And when I finally got it right, I had to do another one, which I also failed, so I had to keep doing it until I got it right. I repeated this process for the remainder of the game. And then I went and impaled myself on a teaspoon because that was more interesting than playing Ninja Blade.

Liked: The game looks great – the city of Tokyo is lush and detailed – total eye-candy.

Disliked: Lack of dynamic, excessive Quick Time Events, unoriginal premise.

Verdict Sentence: Ugh. UGH.