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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’re taking a breath and scent 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 exhausting 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 screen 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 occasions, 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 stay as much as the lofty heights of its forebears – and may be a Recreation 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 executed with a understanding degree of tongue-in-cheek appeal.
The Recreation is fairly exhausting, however in a enjoyable means (not a ‘let’s ship you packing to the start of the Recreation to begin all of it once more’ means). 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 greater than it first appears will drive you on, even by the trickier segments of the Recreation.
As a result of we’ve all been emancipated from the proper logical constraints of the Mega Drive/Genesis period (regardless of what the aesthetic has to say about that), the Recreation affords 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 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 minimize quick.
For those who’ve bought a hankering for the form of Recreation that desires you to ninja run up the aspect 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 Recreation 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. This can be 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 means by its neon-drenched streets while watching a CRT TV at 3am various occasions as you pluck your solution to the tip of this nostalgic expertise. Suggestions don’t come far more stable than that.
Ninja Issen is out now on PC by way of Steam and Nintendo Swap.
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