This text is sponsored by CFK.
It’s superb what a solo dev can do, isn’t it? We often see solo builders engaged on cosy life simulators, perfecting the music and the harvest city vibes over the course of some years, teasing you into their laid-back world filled with bucolic splendour with ease, letting you are taking a breath and odor the proverbial (and literal) flowers. However that isn’t the case with Ninja Issen. No, removed from it.
In Ninja Issen, solo developer Asteroid-J has been arduous at work on an action-platfformer that harckens again to the early days of video video games – when the pixel reigned supreme and all you wanted to quicken a heartbeat and sweaten a palm was a 2D, side-on view of a display filled with laser and precarious ledges.
Ninja Issen is a throwback to these days, however one which has discovered all the teachings of the many years inbetween. It’s quick, it’s livid, and it’s enjoyable; gone are the egregious loading instances, banished the quality-of-life woes pressured upon video games by tight reminiscence squeezes. Right here, in 2023, Ninja Issen proves that the pixel platfromer can reside as much as the lofty heights of its forebears – and may be a sport you’ll find yourself mentioning in the identical breath as Shinobi or Ninja Gaiden. Excessive reward, certainly.
Ninja Issen – which launched to Nintendo Swap and PC on the tail-end of November – settles you into the water with a prolonged (and pretty verbose!) tutorial part, handing you the reigns to your cyberpunk ninja protagonist and letting you run wild. It feels fairly sardonic; conscious of all of the tropes that make the style as irreverent and related as it’s as we speak, however all achieved with a figuring out degree of tongue-in-cheek appeal.
The sport is fairly arduous, however in a enjoyable method (not a ‘let’s ship you packing to the start of the sport to begin all of it once more’ method). Loads of checkpoints and continues can be found for gamers with barely much less dexterous fingers than they’d like, and a compelling story about revenge, cyborg physique enhancements, and teaming up in opposition to one thing larger than it first appears will drive you on, even by way of the trickier segments of the sport.
As a result of we’ve all been emancipated from the suitable logical constraints of the Mega Drive/Genesis period (regardless of what the aesthetic has to say about that), the sport provides you a set of cool instruments to do your wetwork with; you possibly can leap, blink, summon fireballs, double-jump, dodge, cloak, and hail shuriken to your coronary heart’s content material. And also you’ll have to do the entire above if you wish to progress, due to a rogue’s gallery of assorted and fascinating foes that want to see your ninja journey minimize quick.
In case you’ve acquired a hankering for the type of sport that wishes you to ninja run up the facet of a constructing, dispatch a warehouse filled with heavily-armed baddies, after which journey an elevator as much as an imposing behemoth of a boss, you couldn’t ask for a greater sport than Ninja Issen – and you’ll even attempt the primary few ranges
Even the soundtrack appears to take the lead from the likes of Yuzo Koshiro and his impeccable Streets of Rage-era music. It is a correct love-letter to retro gaming, and also you’re going to really feel such as you’re holding onto an outdated Sega pad and battling your method by way of its neon-drenched streets while looking at a CRT TV at 3am quite a lot of instances as you pluck your technique to the tip of this nostalgic expertise. Suggestions don’t come far more strong than that.
Ninja Issen is out now on PC through Steam and Nintendo Swap.