This text is sponsored by CFK.
It’s wonderful 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 stuffed 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 onerous 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 stuffed with laser and precarious ledges.
Ninja Issen is a throwback to these days, however one which has realized all the teachings of the a long time 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 dwell 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 Change 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 performed with a understanding stage of tongue-in-cheek appeal.
The sport is fairly onerous, however in a enjoyable manner (not a ‘let’s ship you packing to the start of the sport to begin all of it once more’ manner). 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 towards one thing larger than it first appears will drive you on, even via the trickier segments of the sport.
As a result of we’ve all been emancipated from the appropriate logical constraints of the Mega Drive/Genesis period (regardless of what the aesthetic has to say about that), the sport provides you a collection of cool instruments to do your wetwork with; you may soar, blink, summon fireballs, double-jump, dodge, cloak, and hail shuriken to your coronary heart’s content material. And also you’ll must do all the above if you wish to progress, due to a rogue’s gallery of various and attention-grabbing foes that want to see your ninja journey reduce brief.
If you happen to’ve obtained a hankering for the type of sport that wishes you to ninja run up the aspect of a constructing, dispatch a warehouse stuffed 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 may even strive 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 previous Sega pad and battling your manner via its neon-drenched streets while gazing a CRT TV at 3am quite a lot of instances as you pluck your method 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 Change.
