Ninja Blade
If Michael Bay directed a Ninja Gaiden movie, then they made a game based of that film, I’m pretty sure this is what it would be like.
Ninja Blade seems to popup out of nowhere. I had no indication that it was coming until it finally landed on store shelves. The box looked interesting, so I decided to give it a shot and download the demo.
The demo starts off a cut scene which looks ok, but the script is pretty lame. The main character feels less like an ninja and more like a rip off of The Spirit (from the terrible Frank Miller movie), or Robin (from Batman 3 & 4). After some back story about how Japan has been called in because they have experience fighting the same threat they are dealing with now, the main character leaps from the helicopter.
The game immediately switches to a QTE, the old-school kind where you have all of .25 of a second to hit the right button. Missing the QTE just rewinds the game to the beginning of the scene and allows you to retry. I saw this rewind effect far too many times during this demo. After several button presses (and at least 2 fails), I ended up in a building surrounded by enemies. The combat is very much like Ninja Gaiden. There are normal and strong attack buttons, a button to use your equipped ninja power, and a block button. You can use to d-pad to switch between your 4 weapons at any time. There’s a katana, dual swords, and 2 heavy swords. The enemies are each weak to a particular type of weapon so it’s essential to switch around. After clearing out this room you jump our and begin to run down the side of the building. You can move around and attack enemies while coming, which was probably the most exciting (if not asinine) part of the demo.
Then following another QTE, you’re facing a huge boss. You have to destroy his rock skin to unveil the critical areas underneath. You can use your ninja vision to see the weak parts, but it’s kind of pointless since the whole boss lights up orange. Once you break through his skin and cut off his two claws he falls to the ground and you can pummel his head for some damage, when he’s halfway dead another QTE occurs and you fight him in the same fashion, but from another level.
Honestly it’s tough to get a great feel for the combat in this demo. 50% of the demo is the boss fight, the other 40% is QTEs and the rest is a single battle and that running down the building scenes.
All in all it seems like a decent game. It feels like every part of it was ripped off from Ninja Gaiden 2, so if you’ve finished that and want something else to fill your time, this will probably do. It’s no where near as good a game, but still seems like a fun time waster. If you aren’t a fan of difficult, fast paced, action games like Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry, I’d stay away from this one.
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